Northwell Health Releases SMART on FHIR Application to Manage Patient Data and Track Progress

InterSystems, a global leader in information technology platforms for health, business, and government applications, today announced that Northwell Health, one of the largest private health systems in the United States, has released a SMART on FHIR application that aggregates, normalizes and stores patient data to better track progress across the care continuum. Enabled in coordination with J2 Interactive using InterSystems HealthShare®, the SMART on FHIR application eliminates the need for a manual workflow and enables care providers to more closely and accurately ensure the successful progression of the patient.

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Northwell is New York’s largest private employer and health care provider, with 23 hospitals and more than 750 outpatient facilities. Northwell delivers more than 39,000 babies annually. An estimated 15 million babies are born prematurely every year, according to the World Health Organization. Northwell is addressing this concern with its SMART on FHIR application. Built on InterSystems HealthShare and based on the Boston Children’s Hospital SMART on FHIR application, Northwell is enabling caregivers to more effectively track a premature baby’s development with minimal disruption to workflow. For those pediatricians who have access to this growth chart, the application is only two clicks away from the electronic medical record (EMR) home screen.

“The addition of the growth chart into the health information exchange has been invaluable for our clinicians, particularly in the Neonatal ICU. The ability to have appropriate growth parameters for all infants has minimized the need to use multiple websites and paper documentation for these babies,” said Deborah Mensch, MD, chief medical information officer at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y., a member of Northwell Health. “Monitoring growth in premature infants is critical to their care, and this tool has eased the burden on our front-line clinicians.”

The app features a graphing function to monitor key health indicators such as weight and height over time and across different caregivers and facilities. For instance, when a baby is born prematurely, the initial care provided at the hospital represents one track in the overall care continuum for the patient, and the next visit at an outpatient office represents a separate workflow in addition to any other subsequent appointments or hospital stays. The new SMART on FHIR application consolidates all of the data from these visits into a single, longitudinal view of the patient, empowering physicians with a more complete picture of the patient’s care history.

“It’s imperative to have accurate, up-to-date information about every patient, but particularly for the premature population where a patient’s growth can change in a matter of hours or days,” said Don Woodlock, VP of HealthShare. “We are proud to be the backbone of a solution that will not only improve care coordination and workflow for caregivers, but that will also ensure the safety of such a fragile patient population.”

While this particular application was initially applied to premature patients, the application could be used for patients of any age. The ability to leverage the core InterSystems’ technology that had already been deployed enabled Northwell and J2 Interactive to use existing APIs and web services, streamlining the overall development process. With approximately six weeks from ideation to delivery, this process has opened up the possibility for Northwell to develop and deploy plug-and-play applications from SMART on FHIR for a wide variety of use cases.

"Having built SMART on FHIR apps on a few different platforms, there's no doubt that HealthShare makes the job much easier, particularly with the flexibility to make changes or adjustments throughout the development process and beyond," said Lou LaRocca, President & CEO of J2 Interactive. "Leveraging HealthShare enabled us to deliver Northwell's growth chart app faster, cheaper, and more reliably.”

For more information on the InterSystems HealthShare product suite, visit https://www.intersystems.com/products/healthshare/.

About InterSystems

InterSystems is the information engine that powers some of the world’s most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 80 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.intersystems.com/.

About Northwell Health

Northwell Health is New York State’s largest health care provider and private employer, with 23 hospitals, about 750 outpatient facilities and more than 13,600 affiliated physicians. We care for over two million people annually in the New York metro area and beyond, thanks to philanthropic support from our communities. Our 70,000 employees – 16,000-plus nurses and 4,000 employed doctors, including members of Northwell Health Physician Partners – are working to change health care for the better. We’re making breakthroughs in medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. We're training the next generation of medical professionals at the visionary Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and the Hofstra Northwell School of Graduate Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies. For information on our more than 100 medical specialties, visit Northwell.edu and follow us @NorthwellHealth on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

About J2 Interactive

J2 Interactive is an award-winning healthcare IT services firm whose deep expertise in application development, interoperability, and analytics drives innovations in health information exchange, patient engagement, and population health. Founded in 2001, J2 has established a reputation as one of the leading providers of customized technology solutions to hospitals, labs, research centers, and HIEs. J2’s approach is rooted in a fundamental belief that systems succeed or fail based on how well they serve the people who depend upon them. Visit www.j2interactive.com and follow them on Twitter @j2_interactive.

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