Geisinger harnesses standards to connect app to multiple EHRs

Geisinger Health System and xG Health Solutions, a company founded by Geisinger in 2013 to commercialize its innovations, have linked their Rheumatology software app to multiple EHR systems by leveraging new draft international standards.

The app initially was developed to interact with the Epic EHR used by the healthcare system. But through use of new international draft standards, Geisinger and xG Health Solutions successfully exchanged clinical data in real-time with Cerner’s EHR.

“This new ‘app approach’ to augmenting EHR functionality has the potential to transform the delivery of healthcare by giving providers access to analyses of information that resides outside and/or inside the EHR, as well as decision support, regardless of the underlying EHR platform,” according to a release. Geisinger anticipates making similar apps available to other healthcare systems in the future.

The approach was developed with support from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARPn) grant, specifically the open-source Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies (SMArt) platform. The web-based interoperable container and the corresponding HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface can exchange information in real-time with any SMArt-on-FHIR-enabled EHR, according to Geisinger.

“Until now, Geisinger EHR-related innovations that improve quality, increase efficiency and reduce the cost of care have not been available to other healthcare delivery systems. This pilot program shows there is now a way to do that,” said Geisinger Health System President and CEO Glenn Steele, Jr., MD, in a statement.