Lighthouse API

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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 to develop innovative tools and services to support Veterans’ needs. VA created a streamlined, modern API development experience to build services that provide Veterans…

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HL7 FHIR

Physician Typing on a laptop

What exactly is Health Level 7’s FHIR®?  Healthcare data has to move. FHIR and other HL7 data standards provide guidelines and data structures so clinical data can move out of Electronic Health Records systems to the other providers who make up a care team. Clinicians need a complete picture of patient data for patient safety…

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The Importance of Immunization Reporting

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Vaccination records (sometimes called immunization records) provide a history of all the vaccines a patient has received. These records are important as they may be required for jobs, travel, or school. Immunization records are compiled by a patient’s medical providers consolidating their vaccinations and reporting them to Immunization Information Systems (IIS).  IIS’s are usually run…

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HIMSS 2022: The Importance of Standards-Based Data Exchange

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This year’s HIMSS conference will feature a number of sessions on data standardization and health information exchange. Before you go to HIMSS, we want to help you better understand what standards-based data exchange looks like and why it’s important for healthcare. It might give you some incentive to attend a session or two. We all agree that…

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What is an API really?

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APIs for … Intelligent People! We love the Dummies© series of books, but being unfamiliar with something new does not a dummy make.  For perspective, here are some background facts about the three biggest realms in science affecting economic activity over the last 2000 years: 1. Medicine – Hippocratic Oath, (350 BC) 2. Business Finance…

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Keeping Everyone in the Know: New CMS ADT Rule

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Author: David C. Kibbe, MD On March 9, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule aimed at enhancing interoperability and increasing patient access to health information. This Final Rule contains a new Condition of Participation (CoP) that requires all hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and Critical Access Hospitals to electronically share (via an…

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The Strengths and Weaknesses of the HL7 FHIR Messaging Standard

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Healthcare IT Data Standards: FHIR  Health Level Seven’s (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a new interoperability standard that has rapidly captured the mind-share of the Health Information Technology (HIT) standards community. FHIR is a standard that enables healthcare data sharing between systems in a manner that is more easily implemented and more expressive…

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