Cleveland — Wouldn’t you like a look inside the Cleveland Clinic’s innovation mindset? Attendees at the HIMSS and Health 2.0 Dev4Health event here this week got just such a glimpse.Teams have spent the past few years focused on developing a FHIR platform to extend their Epic EMR to solve new problems, according to Brent Hicks, Senior Director of Clinical Solutions of Cleveland Clinic’s app development team and William Morris, MD, Senior Director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations.
Here’s an example: The platform enabled them, for example, to develop an app for ICU staff to evaluate the mental health status of patients on a regular basis throughout the day and they accomplished it in just 3 weeks. And that’s just one app of many.
“We’ve had an API platform for about seven years. That started out with an API-based product. There were a lot of ICU projects and we had to build in a whole bunch of security, HIPAA, just a whole bunch of regulatory stuff we had to build into the app,” Hicks said. “And this was a proof of concept so as soon as it was successful we realized we had to put all of that logic in a platform, so all the apps could enjoy that.”