Honest question, how was your experience with getting funding on an open source product within healthcare? My experience so far is that the field is, as you put it, 30 years back, also in terms of business models.
"Access comprehensive EHR data for your patients in seconds, with FHIR R4...", I got Vietnam flashbacks from building an app to interface with the NHS Covid Vax certificate, that was my first encounter with FHIR... And honestly, all I wanted by the end of the day was to set myself on FHIR! Such a complex abstraction. Anyway, Godspeed!
Glad Metriport is addressing this! I hope you will drive a new level of standardization on an open and modern data exchange protocol.
One question: at the product level, would it make sense to go one step further and bet on the future being the cloud - and start supporting existing cloud solution like Google Healthcare (FHIR) API (and others) as storage layers?
There actually is a standard for converting C-CDA records to FHIR. It isn't 100% complete but serves as a useful starting point. If you find problems with it you can feed those back into the standards process.
Microsoft has an open source library which works pretty well and I think implements at least part of that standard, although I haven't used it lately.
https://github.com/microsoft/FHIR-Converter
FHIR also includes unstructured narrative text so it isn't necessarily better than C-CDA in that regard. You'll find that data quality problems come down more to provider systems configuration and charting policies rather than data formats.
A health platform I helped build was open sourced[0] (the apps built on it are closed source and deployed in NHS trusts). Feel free to dig around for any inspiration :-)
As a citizen of Estonia, we pretty much have any government service available over the web, and yes, we also get to enjoy state provided health care, which makes things simpler when it comes to having a single unified system for all health care workers, which we have, have had for quite a while, probably for a decade or more. And it works, including patients who can also log into the system to check any data that is collected on their behalf.
I know this wouldn't fly in the US, but it is a very convenient system for people.
I’m a huge fan of Metriport, Dima, and the whole team! I’m constantly impressed by the strides you are making in addressing this significant problem. I often brainstorm company ideas just to have the opportunity to use Metriport.
- Amit
1. Some governments require ISO certifications for security
2. Some standards bodies require commercial accountability (FDA), data site redundancy, and company inspection by a standards body.
3. The ecosystem for the insurance documentation is never open source. It is not only prohibitively expensive, but comes with legal strings in the EULA.
Good luck, but please read the slicer.org story before committing too much time to the project. =)
I congratulate you on your launch and I'm interested in your converter. I'm surprised you didn't mention the TEFCA effort and wondering if you're planning on becoming your own QHIN (Qualified Health Information Network) or if you just plan on interfacing with all of the major QHIN's?
How are you handling interstate data exchange privacy requirements. Some states have restrictions on what data can be shared across state (thinking about this in terms of things like PDMP queries). I'm also wondering how you are handling the patient data access audit trail as well as information blocking filtering requirements. Perusing your documentation, it looks like you pass along the AuditEvent, does your system create additional audit trails for those who access the patient data? Or is that all being handled upstream w/ your QHINs?