Where APIs meet Health Equity by Design: Introducing the FHIRedApp Health Innovation

Where APIs meet Health Equity by Design: Introducing the FHIRedApp Health Innovation

With a heightened concentrate on wellbeing equity during our work, ONC has adopted the concept of “health fairness by structure.” Along people traces, health IT can, and need to, be made use of to far better detect and mitigate disparities when maximizing options for underrepresented populations. In 2019, below the Top Edge Acceleration Jobs (LEAP) for Health IT application, ONC funded the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Healthcare College (Dell Med) to structure, establish, and display increased individual engagement technologies for treatment and study, with a emphasis on health fairness.

The Dell Med staff proposed establishing a client engagement engineering platform working with application programming interfaces (APIs) and the similar national expectations for interoperability, stability, and authorization being applied by digital wellness documents, namely FHIR® and Good on FHIR.

Designing the FHIRedApp Platform

The FHIRedApp platform was created utilizing human-centered design and style methodology to detect the desires and preferences of a diverse team of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American people. To layout an simple-to-use platform, the group held 20 Local community Engagement Studio (CES) periods with ethnically and racially varied clients from Central Texas. The procedure included beta screening, semi-structured interviews, and pilot testing with participants to make sure the app’s high usability.

A local community navigator led each individual CES session, and the dialogue subject areas incorporated community well being activities, local community readiness, design choices, adoption, and sustainability. The approach for coming up with the application also included human-centered style and design methodologies and insights collected from the CES sessions helped recognized capabilities and capabilities that ethnically and racially assorted sufferers preferred from a well being app platform.  A high-fidelity prototype of the app (Determine 1) was then produced, beta examined by varied sufferers, and employed by the growth group to code for the last app.

Image of the FHIRedApp showing the prototype of how the app may work.

Figure 1: FHIRedApp significant-fidelity prototype

When the FHIRedApp will be in a position to join to FHIR API endpoints supplied by qualified EHR technologies expected by the ONC Cures Act Remaining Rule, the system has also been designed to leverage wellness information exchanges (HIEs) and investigate networks, which act as facts aggregators from multiple EHRs. The FHIRedApp is also an application system that enables people to achieve access to their facts, grant access to all or part of their details, and make it out there to 3rd-occasion application developers by using FHIR APIs. The Dell Med staff is presently creating a pilot application to support with recruitment for exploration experiments and integration with social expert services referral networks.

The development of FHIRedApp has demonstrated how technologies innovations utilizing FHIR APIs for exchanging facts can be knowledgeable by way of a methodology of local community engagement and human-centered design. On the lookout ahead, the workforce and neighborhood users hope to frequently give further characteristics and enhancements on the platform and take a look at scalability applying other HIEs and facts resources in the foreseeable future. To discover additional about this project, study the Dell Med team’s findings.

 

Related Post