SMART Health IT App Gallery

Boston Children's Hospital

Centralizing Discovery of SMART & FHIR Medical Applications
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The Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital unveiled the refreshed gallery as a beta release at the HIMSS17 conference and is now live.

Boston Children's Hospital needed an update to their SMART Health IT App Gallery, a central place for the community of health and technology professionals to find and post listings for medical applications that use the SMART and FHIR standards. These standards are quite powerful because they enable technologists to create apps for electronic health records that are interoperable.

Challenge

Boston Children’s Hospital’s SMART Health IT Project needed to update their app gallery in order to enable those looking for apps based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources to have an easier time searching and comparing.

In June 2016, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology awarded SMART Health IT a grant to support enhancement of the SMART App Gallery, which provides a marketplace that enables app developers to share apps that use FHIR to achieve various forms of information exchange. Open, free and widely adopted application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used for many purposes to connect to clinical systems.

Solution

Through iterative and collaborative work with the product owner, Bocoup was able to go from idea to prototype to enterprise-class, complex application quickly, without sacrificing polish or usability.

Bocoup conducted stakeholder interviews, performed usability tests on the existing design elements, made recommendations, designed and implemented an application gallery that impressed the plethora of users and investors. The web application’s technical components were developed using the PostgreSQL and React open standards, providing fast load times and fast navigation around its responsive layout supporting many modern browsers and devices.

Impact

This update makes it easier for innovators to share apps that seamlessly and securely run across the healthcare system.The product’s intuitive user experience design has improved workflow efficiency for health tech professionals, hospital administrators and, BCH staff. Because the application was developed using open web standards and industry-standard conventions, it could easily be handed off to the hospital’s development team for ongoing maintenance and enhancement.