Cerner Corp. and its competitor, Epic Systems, both will be compatible with a new medication management app, which will make it easier for patients to keep track of their medications and help doctors make sure prescriptions are followed.
Boston-based Medisafe serves 3.5 million patients through its existing application. The app already can pull patients’ medication information from CVS and Walgreens, but it soon will be able to connect with participating electronic health record systems, including those from Cerner and Epic.
Sam Lambson, senior business strategist for Cerner open platforms, said the tool would be one of the first applications Cerner clients could make available to patients, as early as next year. Once Medisafe is integrated with an EHR, both doctors and patients can use the app.
Medisafe’s app was developed using an open API, or publicly available “building blocks” that govern how applications can communicate with one another. The Medisafe app will be able to communicate with Cerner, Epic, Allscripts Healthcare and other companies’ EHR systems after they are updated to support it.
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“It is highly exciting to see that start to open up,” Medisafe CEO Omri Shor said. “We are not able to do that without them. For the first time ever, we see the wall falling down.”
Currently, less than 1 percent of hospitals have these open APIs, but Shor said he expects this to change in the first or second quarter of next year.
Medisafe, Cerner and Epic were invited to participate in a demonstration of the technology led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on Wednesday.
“What made this event so successful was the high level of collaboration between clients, Cerner and third-party app developers,” Lambson wrote in an email. “This further demonstrates how quickly third-party developers can integrate into Cerner technology and begin supporting the health care community.”
Cerner met Medisafe while working with Boston Children’s Hospital on interoperability, which allows records to be shared between EHR systems. Lambson said Shor’s patient app fit nicely into a challenge by HHS to showcase the use of open APIs to improve patient engagement.
With this in mind, Cerner connected Medisafe with its code developer program, which encourages third-party developers to build platforms compatible with Cerner’s EHR using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources framework.
“They were amazing in supporting us,” Shor said. “People are starting to think about health care, specifically medications, as an ecosystem.”
Date: December 19, 2016