Innovating with the Azure Healthcare APIs

Overview

The Cures Act was signed into law on Dec. 13, 2016 with the goal of accelerating healthcare innovation and improving the overall patient experience. Microsoft continues to lead in this space and has made it easier than even to achieve new levels of interoperability, develop innovative applications, and conduct analytics at scale with their Azure Healthcare APIs. For those of you unfamiliar with this service, Microsoft provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution to quickly deploy a fully-managed, scalable, and secure FHIR "server". This solution provides the framework to support the storage of data in a CosmosDB with a complete API set that encompasses the FHIR standards.

Let's Get Started

Suppose I'm an entrepreneurial developer at a healthcare system, and I have decided to build a mobile application to manage Family Member History for patients that decide to use my application. Maybe, I have first hand experience of being asked (multiple times in the same hospital system) if any family member has ever had an adverse reaction to anesthesia. Maybe, I have indicated on every occasion "yes, my brother had a severe reaction for a surgery he had". The application requirements are rather simple, I need to be able to view my current information, add new records, and delete or update incorrect information. To support this, I will authenticate as a Patient, then display a simple list of the current records with a few menu options to Create, Update, or Delete a record.

Solution Approach

With the Azure Healthcare APIs, I have a full platform to build this application leveraging the service for data storage and a full API set to interact with the data across any programming language of my choosing. I also have all of the capabilities necessary to authenticate as a patient using Azure Active Directory. The next steps, in this journey, are to seed my FHIR database with data from the EHR (Patient & Family Member History to start). To accomplish this, I can either use the Microsoft FHIR Bulk Load and Export utility or develop an integration using the EHR's API in a more real-time manner. To take the solution one step further, I can sync my FHIR data to Azure Synapse and enable analytics and reporting on the data with minimal effort.

Why Not EPIC

I'm sure some of you running Epic may ask, "Can't I just build this using Epic's FHIR APIs?". The short answer is, not at this time, due to their Open APIs being fairly limited in functionality. Nearly all of their Open APIs only provide Read and Search capabilities as indicated in their developer portal. If you couple this limitation with organizations potentially having multiple EHR systems, using the Azure Healthcare API service becomes a great option to build new capabilities on an integrated platform.

More Information

If you are interested in learning more, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at any time.

In addition, you can contact your Microsoft Account Team to schedule time to discuss your use-case, and visit Microsoft Learn to get more details and explore additional solutions within the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Disclaimer:?All views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent those of any entity, whatsoever, with which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated. The content is for educational purposes only and shall not be understood or construed as legal, financial, tax, medical, health, or any other professional advice.