EHR vendor drchrono has announced that its electronic health record, practice management and revenue cycle products now support the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources specification. 

With FHIR, drchrono said it is enabling 10 million patients to access to their healthcare information via the FHIR API through the company’s inpatient health record.

The new application programming interface is designed to support the Precision Medicine Sync for Science Initiative and fulfills one of the requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 3 to enable a patient health record API, the vendor said.

Drchrono’s Patient API also gives users the ability to control their own data and share the data with others throughout the continuum of care. Any developer through the personal health record FHIR API can build applications on top of drchrono so researchers and other physicians with the patient’s approval can view that person’s data.

Most developers know what APIs are, they know the modern technology stacks, but they do not necessarily know what HL7 or X12 are, the company said.

FHIR, on the other hand, enables developers to move into healthcare and start building new apps as quickly as possible using concepts from other modern technology practices, he said.  

The healthcare system increasingly requires a patient to play more of a part to ensure they are getting the right care in the right setting at the right time.

“Increasingly, more of our healthcare system’s burden is on patients, when it comes to higher deductibles, the need for second opinions, the need to understand what preventive services are available to them,” said Aneesh Chopra, the former U.S. CTO and CEO of CareJourney. “That shift to more responsibility is concurrent with the need to have more information so you can get better at that step.”