Revamping Solution Architecture and Enabling Interoperability on Healthcare Referral Platform

Our team comprised of engineers, business analyst, and quality assurance specialists chose the market leaders – athenahealth, Epic, and Allscripts to run test integrations. It was concluded that the best possible solution would be to implement an EHR system that supports SMART on FHIR:

• Enable interoperability between different platforms
• Automate the process of e-referral generation
• Integrate data including medical records
• Store patient information

Among all, Epic was chosen as the most suitable EHR provider as it supports SMART on FHIR. This allows the platform to integrate seamlessly with the given functionality of many EHR providers.

Our client has adopted HL7 FHIR release 4.0.1 as the foundational data exchange standard recommended both by the ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to ensure the security of patient health data through APIs.

The team comprised a solution architect, a business analyst, Java software engineers, and a project manager who set out to test potential EHRs. The business analyst devised a general scenario for creating a request:

1. Provider finds the patient in Epic EMR and opens the app from EMR
2. The platform is launched and the patient profile opened with data gained from Epic EMR
3. Provider searches for an appropriate specialist to make a referral
4. The specialist gets the referral request in-app, checks for an opening in the receiving EMR, and confirms the referral request in the platform
5. The provider is notified about the referral request confirmation in the app
6. The platform requests receiving EMR to check for existing patients
7. Receiving EMR creates patients based on patient data from the platform
8. The platform pushes referral request data to the receiving EMR to create an appointment
9. Receiving EMR creates an appointment with the appropriate status