The EHR API Renaissance: athenahealth's Event-Driven APIs and CDS Hooks
The EHR API Renaissance - by Brendan Keeler - Health
Summary
athenahealth has released event-driven APIs, continuing its investment in the developer ecosystem. This upgrade improves upon previous complex data retrieval methods, signaling a new phase of competition among EHR platforms.
Details
This article discusses a significant shift in how Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems expose their functionality via APIs. athenahealth has historically invested heavily in its developer ecosystem, but previously, notifying applications about data changes required developers to perform complex and inefficient polling—checking a 'changed data' endpoint at five-minute intervals. This method was operationally difficult, prone to errors, and wasteful of resources. With the alpha release of event-driven APIs, athenahealth addresses this core limitation. Instead of constant polling, applications can now be notified efficiently when data changes occur. This advancement is crucial for improving interoperability in healthcare IT. Coupled with the growth seen in fields like CDS Hooks, this development marks what the author calls the 'EHR API Renaissance,' suggesting a major evolution and increased competition among EHR platforms.
Technology Note
FHIR（Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources）は医療データ交換の国際標準。このエントリの関連技術: FHIR
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