Development of an application concerning fast healthcare interoperability resources based on standardized structured medical information exchange version 2 data

Abstract

Background and objective: A mobile application for personal health records (PHR) would allow patients to access their clinical data easily. When PHR connects with multiple electronic health records (EHRs), doctors and patients can exchange large quantities of patient data from the EHR (e.g., medication list, diagnoses, allergies, and laboratory data). Furthermore, personal daily records can also be retrieved from PHR (e.g., blood pressure, pulse, dietary habits, and exercise). However, no standard interoperability between EHRs and PHR has been established. This study aims to convert clinical data in EHRs into the Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data format while developing a PHR application to present the FHIR data.

Methods: In Japan, Standardized Structured Medical Information eXchange version 2 (SS-MIX2) is typically utilized as a health information exchange to preserve and elicit clinical data from EHRs. We converted clinical data in the SS-MIX2 storage at Tohoku University Hospital into the FHIR repository server using the R4 standard. Additionally, we used the Swift programming language to build a PHR application.

Results: We converted patients' basic information, disease names, diagnostic reports, prescriptions, and injection data from the SS-MIX2 to the FHIR server. Besides, we launched a PHR application that could retrieve data from the FHIR server to display patients' clinical information.

Conclusions: Our work demonstrated the conversion of SS-MIX2 data into the FHIR and presented them with our PHR application. This mechanism may be useful to accelerate the sharing of clinical information among doctors and patients.

Keywords: Electronic health record; Fast health interoperability resource; Health information exchange; Interoperability; Personal health record.