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

With a heightened target on wellness equity all over our operate, ONC has adopted the thought of “health equity by design.” Along individuals lines, health IT can, and need to, be made use of to much better determine and mitigate disparities while boosting prospects for underrepresented populations. In 2019, below the Foremost Edge Acceleration Initiatives (LEAP) for Wellness IT program, ONC funded the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical University (Dell Med) to layout, create, and demonstrate increased affected person engagement technologies for care and research, with a emphasis on overall health fairness.

The Dell Med staff proposed producing a client engagement technological know-how platform utilizing software programming interfaces (APIs) and the exact countrywide specifications for interoperability, protection, and authorization currently being employed by digital overall health data, namely FHIR® and Intelligent on FHIR.

Planning the FHIRedApp System

The FHIRedApp system was designed employing human-centered design methodology to recognize the requires and tastes of a numerous team of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American people. To layout an quick-to-use system, the crew held 20 Community Engagement Studio (CES) classes with ethnically and racially diverse sufferers from Central Texas. The method included beta testing, semi-structured interviews, and pilot testing with contributors to guarantee the app’s higher usability.

A group navigator led each CES session, and the discussion topics integrated local community health ordeals, community readiness, structure preferences, adoption, and sustainability. The system for creating the app also incorporated human-centered design methodologies and insights gathered from the CES sessions helped recognized options and capabilities that ethnically and racially numerous patients ideal from a wellness application platform.  A high-fidelity prototype of the app (Figure 1) was then formulated, beta examined by numerous sufferers, and applied by the enhancement staff to code for the final application.

Figure 1: FHIRedApp substantial-fidelity prototype

Whilst the FHIRedApp will be in a position to hook up to FHIR API endpoints furnished by accredited EHR technologies required by the ONC Cures Act Closing Rule, the platform has also been intended to leverage overall health facts exchanges (HIEs) and investigation networks, which act as info aggregators from a number of EHRs. The FHIRedApp is also an application platform that will allow clients to obtain obtain to their information, grant obtain to all or portion of their data, and make it accessible to 3rd-get together application developers by way of FHIR APIs. The Dell Med staff is presently acquiring a pilot application to help with recruitment for investigate research and integration with social companies referral networks.

The progress of FHIRedApp has revealed how technological know-how improvements working with FHIR APIs for exchanging information can be educated through a methodology of local community engagement and human-centered structure. Seeking ahead, the crew and local community users hope to frequently provide supplemental features and enhancements on the system and examination scalability applying other HIEs and knowledge sources in the foreseeable future. To find out extra about this undertaking, study the Dell Med team’s findings.