External Interfaces and Raxa

Owned by Surajit Nundy
Last updated: May 23, 2012

If the Raxa EMR is to be useful, it has to "play nice" with other systems.  People use all kinds of other systems to store their healthcare information and while it would be great if all the people in the world, healthcare providers and patients, used our system, our system must allow the secure inflow and outflow of data into and from our system.  To make those flows seamless, data standards and transfer protocols are evolving that allow systems around the world to talk to one another.  Thus, this effort is to create a specification and implementation for Raxa that would allow secure, private health interoperability of patient data.

A desired set of functions that we would want to implement are:-

  1. A patient who has digital health data created in a non-Raxa system should be able to (or give permission to a provider to) securely and privately "pull" that data into Raxa. 
  2. A patient who has digital health data stored in Raxa should be able to (or give permission to a provider to) securely and privately "push" that data into another system.
  3. A patient should be able to download and store a secure and private copy of their information from Raxa that they would then be able to re-import in the future to Raxa or export to another system.
  4. A designated provider should, in an emergency, be able to access (that is audited) a copy of information from Raxa relevant to a patient's condition.
  5. A patient and provider should be able to give informed consent for these functions in an automated manner that does not require that they be literate.
  6. ....
There are a few large efforts that have addressed the issue of health data interoperability. Examples of these are:-
  1. USA - the National Health Information Network (NHIN) and it's CONNECT open source software (https://developer.connectopensource.org/display/CONNECTR33/Source+Code+Install+(Linux))
  2. USA - Mirth Connect is a widely adopted, standards-based open source healthcare integration engine that securely filters, maps, and routes messages between health information systems (http://www.mirthcorp.com/webinars/mirth-nhin-connect-webinar)
  3. Europe - epSOS aims to design, build and evaluate a service infrastructure that demonstrates cross-border interoperability between electronic health record systems in Europe. (http://www.epsos.eu/home/about-epsos.html)
  4. HL7 - Health Level Seven International (HL7, http://www.hl7.org/) is the global authority on standards for interoperability of health information technology with members in over 55 countries.
  5. SDMX-HD - A Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX)-based data exchange format intended to serve the needs of the Monitoring and Evaluation community. It has been developed by WHO and partners to facilitate exchange of indicator definitions and data in aggregate data systems (http://www.sdmx-hd.org/).
We hope to, in this project, further define the specification above and also define a timeline and milestones of an implementation below.