Ignite data interoperability with SMART on FHIR

Editor's Note: This blog was published prior to the transition to WebMD Ignite.

Are you a health care provider looking to improve patient engagement and clinical workflow to drive better health outcomes? Is data interoperability holding you back from fully adopting a value-based care model? If so, you’re not alone. More than 70 percent of health care financial executives say that data interoperability must improve within the next three years to ensure the success of value-based care.

At WebMD Ignite, we help our healthcare customers tackle data interoperability now leveraging a powerful combination of two innovative technologies—SMART on FHIR®. While some hospitals and health systems are already familiar with these technologies, many are still grappling to fully understand the basics and overall value proposition.

SMART on FHIR fundamentals

SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies) is the application side while FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is all about the data. SMART enables developers and innovators to create apps seamlessly and securely within a health care system’s EHR. FHIR is a standard that allows application vendors to exchange data with an EHR. This allows the SMART applications to personalize the content and experience to the patient’s profile.

Together, they create a framework to build health care apps that can run across any health care system, in a secure manner, without custom code.

What’s so hot about FHIR?

Most of today’s providers and health systems are still limited to episodic data retrieval and exchange of patient data. This limits care coordination, data analytics, and decision-making. It’s time for different sources of data—from hospitals, clinicians, health plans, patient portals, databases, and patients—to effectively talk to one another to exchange stored patient information to provide personalized and real-time experience.

FHIR saves time on the often-burdensome steps to mine big data, access patient records, and make recommendations for more intelligent tools and materials. It can establish data source access standardization for three key benefits:

Spend more time with your patients: Greater choice of apps and devices to support clinical workflow at the point of care allows clinicians to spend less time at computer workstations and more time with patients.

Maximize your EHR investment: FHIR enables health care institutions to maximize investment by streamlining internal customization projects and drawing on a library of innovative apps.

Integrates easily with customers’ EHR systems: Accelerates the creation of best-of-breed apps and reduces the cost and complexity of trying to integrate with customers’ EHR systems.

Meet Ignite on FHIR

WebMD Ignite leverages the SMART on FHIR framework to deliver our latest generation of patient education applications—Ignite on FHIR®. It gives providers on-demand access within their existing workflow to suggested educational content on thousands of topics including HealthSheets™, lab tests, drug sheets, videos, KidsHealth® instructions, and discharge instructions—tailored to the patient’s age, gender, and primary language.

Ignite on FHIR features:

• Support of SMART on FHIR standards for easy implementation
• Ability to prescribe video content and other assets
• Ability for physicians to customize content to make patient-specific edits at the point of care, or administrators can globally customize content based on community and branding needs
• Optimized distribution via print, patient portal, and digital options
• Automatic updates that ensure accurate and current content
• Ability to indicate education favorites by clinician
• Capacity to bundle content into folders
• Built-in patient assessments that write back to the patient record

In a quickly evolving industry landscape where time and workflow are tied directly to outcomes and regulatory mandates, the ability to access tools—such as personalized patient education, cardiac risk assessments, genomics, prescription drug monitoring, and more—directly from your EHR is a game-changer. Learn more about our Ignite on FHIR solution that ignites data interoperability for improved patient engagement and clinical workflows to drive better health outcomes.

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7. The Flame Design mark is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7.