Duke Liberates Epic EHR Data with Apple HealthKit and FHIR

Duke Medicine claims to be the first Epic-based health system to implement the Fast Health Information Resources application programming interface in conjunction with Apple's HealthKit within a live environment. FHIR is an emerging interoperability protocol that was all the rage at HIMSS15 and appears to be even hotter going into HIMSS16 – where Duke’s director of mobile technology strategy Ricky Bloomfield, MD intends to discuss accomplishments and lessons learned during the Monday morning keynote titled “A leap forward in healthcare.”

Bloomfield’s talk will touch on recent innovations that help Duke’s physicians and patients connect in meaningful ways. Using HealthKit and FHIR, for instance, “enables us to integrate standards-based apps without significant configuration or effort,” Bloomfield said. On top of that foundation Duke can “liberate electronic health records data by using standardized application programming interfaces so data can be consumed by innovators.”

Duke is among an elite corps of cutting-edge hospital systems already using Apple’s HealthKit in a pilot to integrate with Epic MyChart. Ochsner Health System and Stanford Health are also using HealthKit with Epic. As the physician leading Duke’s HealthKit charge, Bloomfield has seen interest in a range of Duke’s practices areas, most notably endocrinologists, obstetrics and gynecology, even oncologists...