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

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

With a heightened emphasis on wellbeing fairness throughout our work, ONC has adopted the thought of “health fairness by design.” Alongside individuals lines, overall health IT can, and should really, be utilised to much better discover and mitigate disparities though maximizing alternatives for underrepresented populations. In 2019, less than the Major Edge Acceleration Tasks (LEAP) for Wellness IT program, ONC funded the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Professional medical School (Dell Med) to style and design, develop, and exhibit enhanced patient engagement systems for treatment and investigation, with a emphasis on well being fairness.

The Dell Med team proposed building a affected person engagement technology system working with software programming interfaces (APIs) and the same nationwide benchmarks for interoperability, safety, and authorization becoming applied by electronic health and fitness records, particularly FHIR® and Intelligent on FHIR.

Creating the FHIRedApp Platform

The FHIRedApp platform was created employing human-centered design methodology to establish the wants and choices of a assorted group of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American people. To design and style an quick-to-use system, the workforce held 20 Group Engagement Studio (CES) sessions with ethnically and racially diverse patients from Central Texas. The approach associated beta testing, semi-structured interviews, and pilot tests with individuals to make certain the app’s high usability.

A local community navigator led each and every CES session, and the discussion matters incorporated local community wellness activities, group readiness, style and design tastes, adoption, and sustainability. The procedure for creating the app also integrated human-centered style methodologies and insights gathered from the CES classes helped identified functions and abilities that ethnically and racially diverse sufferers wished-for from a well being application system.  A superior-fidelity prototype of the application (Figure 1) was then produced, beta analyzed by various patients, and made use of by the improvement workforce to code for the remaining application.

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

Figure 1: FHIRedApp superior-fidelity prototype

Even though the FHIRedApp will be ready to join to FHIR API endpoints supplied by licensed EHR technologies required by the ONC Cures Act Last Rule, the system has also been built to leverage overall health data exchanges (HIEs) and investigate networks, which act as data aggregators from many EHRs. The FHIRedApp is also an app platform that allows people to gain entry to their info, grant obtain to all or element of their data, and make it offered to third-get together application builders through FHIR APIs. The Dell Med crew is presently developing a pilot app to support with recruitment for investigate experiments and integration with social expert services referral networks.

The development of FHIRedApp has proven how know-how innovations employing FHIR APIs for exchanging info can be informed by way of a methodology of community engagement and human-centered layout. Wanting forward, the staff and neighborhood members hope to continuously supply supplemental characteristics and enhancements on the platform and test scalability making use of other HIEs and facts sources in the future. To study more about this challenge, go through the Dell Med team’s findings.

 

Leave a Reply