Lighthouse API
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is using an API program called Lighthouse to create innovative applications that improve care. Lighthouse is an API program that gives developers secure access to VA data. This enables them to develop innovative tools and services to support Veterans’ needs. VA created a streamlined, modern API development experience to build services for reliable patient record access. This program lets Veterans share data with other providers without human intervention. This enables a coordinated ecosystem of care across the community.
Connecting the Past to the Present
How is it possible to connect the two disparate world of iPhones and VA’s legacy IT system called VistA? VistA is a 40 year old custom Electronic Health Records (EHR) system. J P Systems provides the expertise which created the data mapping and data exchange designs. This empowers the Lighthouse app on a smart phone to connect to the VA systems and retrieve data. We provided the design to transform legacy (native) VA healthcare data into a standard format for data exchange (interoperability).
We use HL7’s FHIR standard to format the data exchange messages. J P Systems analysts were able to connect the two different worlds of smart phones and legacy VA data. Subsequently, the Lighthouse development team could focus on building robust, agile apps to support Veterans and their chosen providers.
Key issues the team faced included resolving basic differences in assumptions around workflow for medication orders. Also, we solved how to fit specialized VA vocabularies of operation into the high-level FHIR categories designed for general interoperability. Additionally, we managed different access constraints in clinician-facing and patient-facing situations.
J P Systems also consolidated tactical design decisions made over several point-solutions projects into an overarching data standards architecture. This was tailored to fit into the VA’s interoperability architecture. This framework allows the diverse stakeholders in this enormous enterprise to coordinate and share data without process bottlenecks.