Revamping Solution Architecture and Enabling Interoperability on Healthcare Referral Platform

Healthcare

TECHNOLOGIES

SERVICES

EXPERTISES

Cloud Development Services

Project Context

Solution

Outcome

About Client
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.
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.
Business challenge
Our 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 company with extensive experience in building HIPAA-compliant products and solution architecture expertise.
Binariks team helped the client with the following challenges:
- Analyzed which EHR providers could be integrated with the platform
- Created solution architecture that meets the requirements of HIPAA and ensured secure health data exchange when the platform got integrated with other EHR providers
- Enabled interoperability and automated generation of electronic referrals and transferring e-health data from one EHR system to another

Solution
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.
Implementation
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

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
- The platform provides up-to-date patient information needed for healthcare providers and their patients to make timely diagnosis and management decisions
- The 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.