FHIR App Provides Precision Medicine Support at Point of Care

FHIR is helping to power a new precision medicine oncology app that brings clinical decision support to the point of care.

Two of the most intriguing trends in healthcare may be able to work together to bring advanced clinical decision support directly to the point of care, suggest researchers who developed a FHIR-based precision medicine application that integrates with electronic health records.

The prototype application, described in a study published in JAMIA, is aimed at oncologists who are increasingly relying on genomic information to diagnose and treat complex patients.  Using the Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technology (SMART) and FHIR data standards from HL7, the app presents visualizations of genomic variants to help providers target personalized care to patients.

“The definition of cancer and the care of cancer patients are increasingly being driven by tumor genomics, aka molecular profiling,” writes a team of authors from Vanderbilt University, MIT, Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, China, and Harvard Medical School. But the sheer volume of data involved in identifying promising treatments through genomics can overwhelm even the most talented clinician, the authors added...