When someone wants to create a healthcare app, they often think that getting the data they need to make their app work will be easy. They assume that there must be some easy EHR API they can tap into that will provide them with the data access they need. Or maybe they hear about this new more modern FHIR standard that will give them access to that data. Once they dive into the details associated with accessing health data from the EHR, they realize there is a whole lot more to it than most expect.
This is at least part of the problem that Darena Solutions saw when they talked with healthcare application developers. These developers wanted to spend time on their application versus spending time figuring out the hundreds of flavors of FHIR implementations and APIs that are required to get data from the hundreds of EHRs and health IT solutions on the market. Darena Solutions had been working for years providing important interoperability and MIPS solutions to the market when they realized that they could help solve this problem for developers and thus MeldRx was born.
To better understand the newly launched MeldRx product, I sat down to chat with Patrick Schiess, President & CISO at Darena Solutions. In the video interview below, Schiess shares how the solution works and the problems it solves for developers. He also shares some insights into the various healthcare standards available and why MeldRx started with FHIR, but how they can support a number of other standards as well (Side Note: Darena Solutions was one of the first implementers of BlueButton 2.0 for HHS and also the first to get certified for the Cures Act for implementing FHIR APIs, so they have a long history in health data standards and sharing).
Schiess also shared the wide variety of potential users he sees for this product. Healthcare app developers who want access to FHIR data from EHRs are one of the top user-bases, but Schiess also sees how this can be a great solution for research organizations and can even be useful to EHR vendors themselves. EHR vendors have enough things to manage that it makes sense to outsource the hard work of supporting FHIR to a company with specific FHIR expertise across all EHRs.
I also asked Schiess why a developer wouldn’t just connect to the EHR directly. Plus, he shares how many FHIR data sources MeldRx can connect, how they approach connecting to multiple data sources, and how they think about linking the data. Schiess noted how most systems only support read access and not write access. MeldRx offers a unique data vault feature to customers that allows developers to read and write back to their FHIR data store. Finally, he shares a little bit about the MeldRx community they’re launching that helps developers navigate the various aspects of FHIR and SMART on FHIR. This community is a space where developers can ask and answer questions.
Check out the video below to learn more about the newly launched MeldRx and how it can help developers access FHIR APIs more easily. For a hands-on experience with MeldRx, visit Darena Solutions at HLTH23 (booth #5826).
Learn more about MeldRx: https://meldrx.com/
Learn more about Darena Solutions: https://www.darenasolutions.com/
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