What should the API capabilities of a modern EHR look like?
The seamless transfer of healthcare data between providers and to patients is a critical aspect of quality care delivery in the increasingly mobile environment of the 21st century. Interoperability is a key feature of ensuring care is coordinated and appropriate and that patients have the access they need to their own medical records. Elation’s API capabilities make it easy to deliver tech-forward electronic health record (EHR) solutions.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)’s Cures Act Final Rule requires open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), encouraging secure access to healthcare data. The Final Rule requires that health IT developers use standardized APIs and has set standards for transparency, allowable fees, and appropriate business practices.
ONC states that to “fully realize the potential of EHRs to improve care and accelerate scientific discovery, it is critical to develop standardized methods to enhance communication and interaction between different health IT systems and mobile applications (apps).” The agency’s certification criteria for APIs for EHRs are designed to enable access to health information for independent physicians and their patients, in addition to research purposes.
Elation Health has responded with a cloud-based EHR platform that is built on top of a modern API and database tools that enable engineers and product teams to deliver high quality, tech-forward solutions for healthcare providers. Elation’s API capabilities are trusted by leading innovators in the primary care field.
Elation API 2.0 enables you to create applications that interact with key components of the Elation EHR platform. Design goals include:
- Comprehensive Read Access to the patient chart – includes read access to the patient’s profile items such as demographics, problem list, histories, appointments, bills, medications, and reports.
- Selective Write Access with coded patient chart data – the ability to add coded data to enrich the patient’s chart such as adding ICD10-code diagnosis and creating CVX-coded immunizations.
- PMS-integration ready – the Elation scheduling and billing API enable seamless integration with 3rd party PMS systems, enabling you to easily build single-directional synchronization for appointment and billing data.
- CCDA-based data exchange – the ability to export a patient chart in the CCDA format.
Top level API categories for Elation’s solutions are:
- PATIENT PROFILE API – This API is comprised of resources that represent the patient’s demographics (e.g., name, dob, address, insurances, etc.), clinical profile (e.g., problem list, allergies, histories, etc.)
- PATIENT DOCUMENT API – This API is comprised of resources that represent the patient’s set of clinical documents (e.g., visits, visit notes, non-visit notes, medication). All documents are signable, and we maintain a few important timestamps for each document (e.g., creation date, signed date, document date, chart date). Once signed off, these documents cannot be updated.
- SCHEDULING API – The Appointment resource represents the full schedule for every physician and staff in a practice. With the scheduling API, you can fully manage a practice’s schedule with an external application. The appointment resource supports all CRUD operations.
- BILLING API – The bill resource represents an itemized superbill used by physicians for reflecting rendered services. You can use this API to integrate with 3rd-party PMS billing vendor for claim submission and processing.
- PRACTICE API – The practice and physician resources represent members of a practice. At the moment, this is a read-only API that does not support membership management (e.g., adding new physicians to practice, disabling staff who just left, etc.)
Explore our Developer Sandbox to learn more about Elation’s API capabilities.
