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Request for an API that provides the full legal record for a patient, pulling data from all associated care team members (hospital and outpatient). This includes vitals, documentation, medication administration, respiratory therapy, operative reports, etc. The current process for requesting records from HIM departments is poor, often requiring multiple requests and third-party printing, leading to missing information and delays, especially for medical negligence reviews.
"Once you've integrated with one instance of X EHR, you've integrated with one instance of X EHR" is a tired trope. Every healthcare business is different. At a minimum, they have different locations, different staff, different departments and specialties, different procedures, different workflows. So yes, they've bent the EHR to fit their unique operational needs. To ask them to be the same is to ask them to sacrifice innovation, too. Without trying new medications, new procedures, new devices, new workflows, we can't get to the point we identify the care models that work. Entropy is the feature, not a bug. It's not unique to healthcare. Salesforce integrations are still a nightmare of custom objects and fields. Every Shopify store has different product taxonomies. SAP implementations are notoriously bespoke. Yet somehow these industries manage to build thriving ecosystems of third-party tools and integrations. What's different in some other industries (and what we should be clamoring for) is that APIs exist specifically to expose the variance, not hide it. Shopify's API tells you exactly what custom fields this particular store has added to their products. Even Salesforce, for all its complexity, has robust metadata APIs that let you discover what custom objects and fields exist in any given instance. For so many EHRs, we lack the discovery mechanism. There's no easy way to ask "what departments exist here?" or "what custom order types have you created?" or "what flowsheets do this health system have?" APIs for foundational data are either non-existent or require archeological expeditions through implementation guides, CSV dumps, and tribal knowledge from IT staff who've been there since go-live. We don't need to pretend every ICU works the same way - we need EHRs to expose the APIs for their customers' customization. Let me query for all active departments, all order types, all flowsheet templates, all custom fields. Let me understand programmatically that your "cardiac stepdown unit" is called "3West" and uses different observation frequencies than your "surgical stepdown" called "PCU-2."