After some seven years of watching the US government push interoperability among health records, and hearing how far we are from achieving it, I assumed that fundamental divergences among electronic health records at different sites posed problems of staggering complexity. I pricked up my ears, therefore, when John Orosco, CTO of Sansoro Health, said that they could get EHRs to expose real-time web services in a few hours, or at most a couple days.
What does Sansoro do? Its goal, like the FHIR standard, is to give health care providers and third-party developers a single go-to API where they can run their apps on any supported EHR. Done right, this service cuts down development costs and saves the developers from having to distribute a different version of their app for different customers. Note that the SMART project tries to achieve a similar goal by providing an API layer on top of EHRs for producing user interfaces, whereas Sansoro offers an API at a lower level on particular data items, like FHIR.
Sansoro was formed in the summer of 2014. Researching EHRs, its founders recognized that even though the vendors differed in many superficial ways (including the purportedly standard CCDs they create), all EHRs dealt at bottom with the same fields. Diagnoses, lab orders, allergies, medications, etc. are the same throughout the industry, so familiar items turn up under the varying semantics.
FHIR was just starting at that time, and is still maturing. Therefore, while planning to support FHIR as it becomes ready, Sansoro designed their own data model and API to meet industry’s needs right now. They are gradually adding FHIR interfaces that they consider mature to their Emissary application.
Sansoro aimed first at the acute care market, and is expanding to support ambulatory EHR platforms. At the beginning, based on market share, Sansoro chose to focus on the Cerner and Epic EHRs, both of which offer limited web services modules to their customers. Then, listening to customer needs, Sansoro added MEDITECH and Allscripts; it will continue to follow customer priorities.
Although Orosco acknowledged that EHR vendors are already moving toward interoperability, their services are currently limited and focus on their own platforms. For various reasons, they may implement the FHIR specification differently. (Health IT experts hope that Argonaut project will ensure semantic interoperability for at least the most common FHIR items.) Sansoro, in contrast can expose any field in the EHR using its APIs, thus serving the health care community’s immediate needs in an EHR-agnostic manner. Emissary may prevent the field from ending up again the way the CCD has fared, where each vendor can implement a different API and claim to be compliant.
This kind of fragmented interface is a constant risk in markets in which proprietary companies are rapidly entering an competing. There is also a risk, therefore, that many competitors will enter the API market as Sansoro has done, reproducing the minor and annoying differences between EHR vendors at a higher level.
But Orosco reminded me that Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all have competing APIs for messaging, identity management, and other services. The benefits of competition, even when people have to use different interfaces, drives a field forward, and the same can happen in healthcare. Two directions face us: to allow rapid entry of multiple vendors and learn from experience, or to spend a long time trying to develop a robust standard in an open manner for all to use. Luckily, given Sansoro and FHIR, we have both options.
