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EHRs are starting to open up more. EPIC (largest EHR vendor in the US by market share) just opened an API for some types of medical data. AllScripts and Athena
by c-slice 11y ago
EHRs are starting to open up more. EPIC (largest EHR vendor in the US by market share) just opened an API for some types of medical data. AllScripts and Athena also have open-ish APIs. 5 years ago none, and I mean literally zero, of the EHRs had APIs.
- ndonnellan 11y agoPractices on EPIC are still fundamentally non-networked, so even with an "API", you can't scale your product from one practice to all of them without some amount of non-trivial integration. I work at athena and we're dogfooding our API for an increasing number of products/components as it's an easy way to both decouple internal services and improve the API for our partners. From my lowly, uninformed position as a developer, we're growing the number of partners as fast as our team can support at this point.
- markolschesky 11y agoThat's true on the one hand. On the other hand, Athena wants a significant chunk of your profits to connect to their API. At least HL7v2 interface were one-time, scale everywhere from a cost model.
- ch4s3 11y agoOpen Epic is a joke
- kakoni 11y agoCare to elaborate? open.epic.com lists some nice FHIR apis? (Or this more a marketing stunt?)
- ch4s3 11y agoThey aren't really ready for use. FHIR isn't really ready for use. While it's version 1.0.2, there's a lot of functionality lacking; for example you can't send back orders. And it seems like they have frequent breaking changes at this point. I've also yet to hear of anyone actually getting permission and using the open Epic FHIR apis in production. Calling it a joke is probably too harsh though. It just isn't the panacea that PR makes it out to be.