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The SMART Platform: early experience enabling substitutable applications for electronic health records.

Submitted by holger on Wed, 2012/06/27 - 16:56
TitleThe SMART Platform: early experience enabling substitutable applications for electronic health records.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsMandl, KD, Mandel, JC, Murphy, SN, Bernstam, EV, Ramoni, RL, Kreda, DA, McCoy, MJ, Adida, B, Kohane, IS
JournalJ Am Med Inform Assoc
Date Published2012 Mar 17
ISSN1527-974X
Abstract

ObjectiveThe Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies (SMART) Platforms project seeks to develop a health information technology platform with substitutable applications (apps) constructed around core services. The authors believe this is a promising approach to driving down healthcare costs, supporting standards evolution, accommodating differences in care workflow, fostering competition in the market, and accelerating innovation.Materials and methodsThe Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, funds the project. The SMART team has focused on enabling the property of substitutability through an app programming interface leveraging web standards, presenting predictable data payloads, and abstracting away many details of enterprise health information technology systems. Containers-health information technology systems, such as electronic health records (EHR), personally controlled health records, and health information exchanges that use the SMART app programming interface or a portion of it-marshal data sources and present data simply, reliably, and consistently to apps.ResultsThe SMART team has completed the first phase of the project (a) defining an app programming interface, (b) developing containers, and (c) producing a set of charter apps that showcase the system capabilities. A focal point of this phase was the SMART Apps Challenge, publicized by the White House, using http://www.challenge.gov website, and generating 15 app submissions with diverse functionality.ConclusionKey strategic decisions must be made about the most effective market for further disseminating SMART: existing market-leading EHR vendors, new entrants into the EHR market, or other stakeholders such as health information exchanges.

DOI10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000622
PubMed ID22427539
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