Smile Digital Health is named as a Sample Vendor for FHIR API category in the Hype Cycle for U.S. Healthcare Payers, 2024.

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FHIR® is the leading open health standard for data exchange in the world. In the U.S., FHIR is adopted as the mandate for health data exchange by the ONC and CMS. Other regions and nations, like the U.K., EU and Brazil, are also modernizing their IT infrastructures into FHIR, demonstrating increased government support for adoption and regulation.

Having a global common standard for health data exchange brings the entire health ecosystem closer to value-based care initiatives and better global health.

FHIR APIs are a proven mechanism to simplify complex, large volume data exchange across the boundaries of proprietary health IT systems. The Gartner report identifies the market drivers, business impacts, obstacles as well as recommendations for payers evaluating data modernization through FHIR APIs. The report lists Smile as a Sample Vendor for this critical capability.

Key Learnings

The Gartner report outlines the following obstacles with FHIR APIs:

  • Health Care Life Sciences organizations typically have sprawling data environments that would require heavy financial and resource investment to adopt a new way of encoding health data.

  • Technical challenges currently limit FHIR adoption at national scale. Intermediaries can interrupt rather than facilitate data exchange. Patient identity matching across stakeholders is unreliable. 

  • Health data is a rich target for hackers. API security varies from system to system. EHRs are typically secure environments, whereas mobile apps may store API keys and tokens in clear text.

  • FHIR standards are constantly evolving, creating a moving target for implementation and maintenance. 

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How Smile’s Solutions Accelerate Data Modernization While Mitigating Obstacles

Smile’s implementation strategy helps payers build compliance the right way, from the ground up, utilizing FHIR APIs at the data ingestion and integration phases. A true payer modernization strategy consolidates data, workflows and operations, without compromising security, mega-volume performance and scalability. The modularity and flexibility of a FHIR-native solution maintains a single source-of-truth repository and integrates the network (including third-party apps) to provide accurate, real-time data when required. Regardless of how sprawling your data environments might be, we believe Smile can help you create a trustworthy, structured data source.

Why Choose Smile

Smile Digital Health is the maintainer of HAPI FHIR—the world’s prevailing open source reference implementation of FHIR. Smile actively leads and participates in over 31 Implementation Guide (IG) Working Groups including Da Vinci PDex (Payer Data Exchange) and CARIN—the framework that outlines how to integrate third party consumer apps into FHIR in accordance with CMS Patient Access API Rules. So you can trust that as the FHIR standard evolves, Smile’s experts will be leading the charge.

Smile is an award-winning health technology company with FHIR-powered solutions like the Health Data Platform, and complete CMS suite for the CMS-0057-F Rule. Smile has completed over 160 global implementations, as well as over 20 implementations for U.S. payers seeking CMS compliance solutions.

Our experience and expertise enables us to provide solutions for payer data modernization and compliance requirements, while investing in strategies to mitigate the obstacles identified in Gartner’s report. 

Access the report, and find out how Smile can support you.

Gartner, Hype Cycle for U.S. Healthcare Payers, 2024, Mandi Bishop, Austynn Eubank, Connie Salgy, 29 July 2024 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.