InterSystems has announced a new data and collaboration platform to enable application developers to more easily and efficiently access health data. The aim is to help healthcare organizations be more agile and effective in creating and scaling innovative apps.

WHY IT MATTERS

Healthcare is generating more digital data than ever before, but the enormous volume and variety of that information can also be overwhelming.

IRIS for Health, a healthcare-specific offshoot of InterSystems' new IRIS Data Platform, seeks to offer a streamlined approach for developers to access and make use of that data, officials say – giving them analytics and interoperability tools to help in the creation of apps.

To do this, the platform leverages HL7's fast-becoming-ubiquitous Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard – including FHIR Server and SMART on FHIR capabilities. It also supports all major interoperability standards and certifications (HL7 Versions 2 and 3, Consolidated CDA, IHE, DICOM, and others), as well as an extensible data model enabling transitions between those standards.

THE BIGGER TREND

New and innovative clinical applications – cloud-based decision support, mobile tools for patients, AI-powered analytics  – are proliferating everywhere, and fast becoming key enablers of care transformation. But for all the creative energy in the app ecosystem, the raw materials available to forward-thinking developers could be improved

As we showed in our Focus on Innovation this past month, there's boundless great ideas out there, and while the basic infrastructure is there to enable developers' success, startups and upstarts in the app creation space need the larger industry to be thinking as creatively as they are.

And as hospitals and health systems look to scale up their own IT innovations, moving them from pilot to production, InterSystems hopes its new platform, available starting in 2019, will enable them to realize these innovations faster and more efficiently.

ON THE RECORD

"The explosion of healthcare data has created a dire need for innovations that can help the industry keep pace with payer, provider, and patient expectations," said Don Woodlock, vice president of HealthShare at InterSystems, in a statement.

"Healthcare needs a foundational data platform that enables cutting-edge applications to rapidly evolve from concept to reality," he added. "We’re helping healthcare developers bring applications from whiteboard to production faster."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com