Opening the Duke electronic health record to apps: Implementing SMART on FHIR.

Objective: Recognizing a need for our EHR to be highly interoperable, our team at Duke Health enabled our Epic-based electronic health record to be compatible with the Boston Children's project called Substitutable Medical Apps and Reusable Technologies (SMART), which employed Health Level Seven International's (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), commonly known as SMART on FHIR.

Methods: We created a custom SMART on FHIR-compatible server infrastructure written in Node.js that served two primary functions.