SMART Indivo
What SMART adds to Indivo
- SMART is creating a community of developers writing apps that extend electronic health records, making them platforms with easily substitutable functionality. It does so by standardizing an Application Programming Interface that can run across diverse instances of health information technology.
- Indivo X v2.0 supports the full spectrum of SMART apps. So, for example, a SMART app developed for an EHR can run unmodified on Indivo. Or, can be tweaked for a patient-facing experience.
- The Indivo data model will continue to track the evolution of the SMART standard.
What Indivo adds to SMART
- Currently, the SMART API is read-only. Indivo adds rich write capability.
- Also, app developers on the Indivo platform can take advantage of our consumer-facing features including authentication, carenets/sharing, and auditing.
- And Indivo adds consumer-facing data-types which are not yet ratified as part of the SMART model.
- Hence, an Indivo app can be either purely SMART-compliant or take advantage of hybrid functionality.
Coming summer 2012: the SMART-Indivo Portal
- A Hybrid SMART-Indivo app creates a connector enabling Indivo to run fully-sourced by data that a SMART container exposes.
- The trouble that personal health platforms have faced has been in obtaining data. On the other hand, portals such as the Epic MyChart have ample access to data, but very limited functionality. Now, once data in an EHR have been mapped to the SMART API, we can reuse that effort to instantly populate an instance of Indivo.
- With SMART integration of open-source platforms like i2b2, users have a fully open-source option to run substitutable clinician- and patient-facing apps.
How we did it
We won't bore you with the details, but at a high level, the SMART-Indivo integration is based on the acknowledgements that:
- SMART and Indivo had separate but functionally equivalent APIs for reading medical data
- SMART and Indivo had separate but functionally equivalent data models for Problems, Labs, Vitals, etc.
So essentially, we replaced functionality in the Indivo API and data models with their SMART equivalents. This allows Indivo to support the SMART standards, but also support Indivo features (like sharing) which do not yet have an equivalent in SMART. Here's a diagram of what the new SMART-enabled Indivo looks like, architecturally.
