Introducing HL7 FHIR Genomics Operations: a developer-friendly approach to genomics-EHR integration.

Objective: Enabling clinicians to formulate individualized clinical management strategies from the sea of molecular data remains a fundamentally important but daunting task. Here, we describe efforts towards a new paradigm in genomics-electronic health record (HER) integration, using a standardized suite of FHIR Genomics Operations that encapsulates the complexity of molecular data so that precision medicine solution developers can focus on building applications.

Materials And Methods: FHIR Genomics Operations essentially "wrap" a genomics data repository, presenting a uniform interface to applications.

vcf2fhir: a utility to convert VCF files into HL7 FHIR format for genomics-EHR integration.

Background: VCF formatted files are the lingua franca of next-generation sequencing, whereas HL7 FHIR is emerging as a standard language for electronic health record interoperability. A growing number of FHIR-based clinical genomics applications are emerging. Here, we describe an open source utility for converting variants from VCF format into HL7 FHIR format.

Integration of Postcoordination Content into a Clinical Interface Terminology to Support Administrative Coding.

Background: Clinical interface terminologies (CITs) consist of terms designed for clinical documentation and, through mappings to standardized vocabularies, to support secondary uses of patient data, including clinical decision support, quality measurement, and billing for health care services. The latter purpose requires maps to administrative coding systems, such as the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), for diagnoses in the United States.

Objectives: The transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM posed a challenge to CIT users due to the substantially increased details in ICD-10-CM.

Interface terminologies: bridging the gap between theory and reality for Africa.

In the United States and Europe, electronic health records (EHRs) allow information technology and decision-support to facilitate the activities of clinicians and are considered an important component of health care improvement. However, actual adoption of EHRs by physicians has been slow and the use of decision support has been minimal. Part of the difficulty lies in the challenges that users face in capturing structured clinical information.

A mediated health search portal for trusted medical content.

The Internet has become an important source of medical information for both patients and providers. However, it is increasingly difficult to properly access and evaluate the information obtained on the Internet. Search engines are frequently used to find information but suffer either from lack of specificity, or cumbersome requirements for use.

Using a terminology server and consumer search phrases to help patients find physicians with particular expertise.

Objectives: To design and implement a real world application using a terminology server to assist patients and physicians who use common language search terms to find specialist physicians with a particular clinical expertise.

Method: Terminology servers have been developed to help users encoding of information using complicated structured vocabulary during data entry tasks, such as recording clinical information. We describe a methodology using Personal Health Terminology trade mark and a SNOMED CT-based hierarchical concept server.

Website to promote early detection of breast cancer: "www.thinkhealth.com".

We developed and studied a Website to promote breast cancer screening and allow women to access personalized risk and screening information. The site also provides a database of risk and screening information with multimedia enhancement, and direct interaction with experts and online communities. The site was studied to measure its effectiveness in motivating screening intentions and behaviors among a group of women subjects.