MARKET RELEVANCE
The platform has taken a unique niche and empowered EHR systems with the ability to interoperate securely and fast without building additional code for integration.
Revamping Solution Architecture and Enabling Interoperability on Healthcare Referral Platform
Healthcare Referral Platform
Product
Dedicated team
Team model
The client is a cloud platform that facilitates doctor referrals while increasing quality patient care and satisfaction rate. The product simplifies the routines for general practitioners, primary care physicians, specialists, and medical office managers by enabling e-referring between various electronic health records with FHIR-API exchange.
ABOUT CLIENT
01Our client was planning to integrate the platform with as many EHR software providers and, hence, as many hospitals and doctors, as possible. To do this, they needed to automate the electronic record referral and ensure the security of data exchange between EHRs.
Like any other service provider in the healthcare industry, the platform has to comply with the 21st Century Cures Act which requires the following security measures in interoperable digital solutions . This request brought our client to Binariks – a healthcare solution development company with extensive experience in building HIPAA-compliant products and solution architecture expertise.
Binariks team helped the client with the following challenges:
- Analyze which EHR providers could be integrated with the platform
- Create solution architecture that meets the requirements of HIPAA and ensured secure health data exchange when the platform got integrated with other EHR providers
- Enable interoperability and automated generation of electronic referrals and transferring e-health data from one EHR system to another
- Analyzed which EHR providers can be integrated with the platform
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
02Our team comprised of engineers, business analysts, 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:
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Enable interoperability between different platforms
Automate the process of e-referral generation - Integrate data including medical records
- Store patient information in secure storage
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.
SOLUTION
03-
Enable interoperability between different platforms
We picked Binariks based on their technical expertise, overall structure, and the solution they offered. Additionally, they had good reviews online, and we were impressed with their follow-up call.
WHY BINARIKS
04
TECHNOLOGIES
- Java
- Smart on FHIR
- AWS Lambda
- Node.js
PROJECT OVERVIEW
05
IMPLEMENTATION
After a kick-off meeting, the team comprised of a solution architect, business analyst, Java software engineers, and a project manager set out to test potential EHRs. The business analyst devised a general scenario for creating a request:
- Provider finds the patient in Epic EMR and opens the app from EMR
- The platform is launched and the patient profile opened with data gained from Epic EMR
- Provider searches for an appropriate specialist to make a referral
- The specialist gets the referral request in иapp, checks for an opening in the receiving EMR, and confirms the referral request in the platform
- The provider is notified about the referral request confirmation in the app
- The platform requests receiving EMR to check for existing patients
- In case there is no existing patient there, the platform pushes patient data to the receiving EMR
- Receiving EMR creates patients based on patient data from the platform
- The platform pushes referral request data to the receiving EMR to create an appointment
- Receiving EMR creates an appointment with the appropriate status
The solution architect refined the high-level architecture for the platform so that it complies with the HIPAA standard. The new architecture enabled data encryption, smooth transferring of records between EMRs, and enabled interoperability as such.
VALUE DELIVERED
Thanks to Binariks’ assistance, our client now provides secure cloud-based patient information upload and download and effectively facilitates cross-referring for all medical staff. There are currently more than 1.7 million searchable medical provider profiles facilitating patient referral management and secure information exchange.
The product meets the regulations listed by the ONC: as a participant of the Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN), the platform provides up-to-date patient information needed for healthcare providers and their patients to make a timely diagnosis and management decisions.
Our client application is positioned to facilitate the transfer of Admission, Discharge, and Transfer (ADT) information to the patient’s established PCP or primary care practice group from hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and critical access hospitals using the HL7 v2.5.1 exchange standard.