Challenges
- Build a system that would collect and manage aggregated patient information that can be used in practice management and for research
- Build an FHIR-compliant API that would facilitate the interoperability to search for surgeries performed by respective surgical specialists. It should also qualify for the cohort for each surgery
- Customize information for each surgery to identify new patient demographics, surgical details, encounters for episode care
Solutions
- Extracted patient demographic and clinical information from a centralized data collection system and created medical specialty-based cohorts for surgeries since 2015
- Utilized HL7 FHIR resources: patient, Practician, Encounter, Diagnostic Report, Medication, Observation, and Episode of Care for each specialty cohort and enabled interoperability
- Used Hbase for fast recovery of data and ability to maintain a history of resources
- Implemented elastic search to meet the search requirements on FHIR resources
- Created role-based authentication and authorization for accessing the cohort information for abstraction
- Based on surgeons’ documents, they identified and created new observations for complicated surgeries and linked them to the actual surgery
Tools & Technologies
Apache Hbase, HL7 FHIR Foundation, Elasticsearch, Nifi
Key benefits
- Provided simplified interoperability solution FHIR compliant data registry
- Improved ratings by providing quality of care and increasing patient satisfaction
- Fast recovery of data and ability to maintain a history of the resources has improved performance
- Enabled ease in clinical research by using the registries and cohort
