University of Pittsburgh researchers have developed user-friendly software designed to extract data from electronic health records (EHRs) and transform to fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) objects. This transformation allows for upload to the Microsoft Azure Healthcare Application Programming Interface (API) repository.
Description
Microsoft Azure Healthcare API is a cloud-based application for the collection, storing, and analyzing of patient health information. It is increasingly used in patient management, clinical research, and the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support clinical decision making. Novel software has been developed to collect data from existing EHR databases for use in Azure Healthcare API with the potential to improve healthcare efficiency, clinical research, and AI tool development using large existing databases.
Applications
• Extraction and transformation of existing EHR data to the FHIR standard
• AI tool development using Azure Healthcare API
• Clinical research tools
Advantages
Microsoft Azure Healthcare API requires incoming data to be transformed to FHIR objects. Currently, no well-defined technical stacks exist to transform data for bulk input to the Azure Healthcare API. While open-source solutions exist, they require developer skills and time. This novel software has been designed to include a technical stack and a user interface allowing non-specialists to easily transform existing data to the FHIR standard, allowing for import to an Azure Healthcare API repository without the need for developer skills. Additionally, the FHIR standard is fast becoming the worldwide standard for sharing healthcare data, and the present software allows for easy transformation of existing datasets improving the use of such data in health research.
Invention Readiness
Software has been developed. Using a graphical user-friendly interface users can export data extracts from the Cerner Millennium database, transform these to FHIR objects, and upload them to Azure Healthcare API. Software is easy to use ensuring non-specialists can readily extract data from existing EHR databases and populate, or “hydrate”, the Azure Healthcare API. While this software has been developed for Cerner Millennium data it can also be used with other EHR data formats including Epic Clarity.
IP Status
Research Tool
