Growth of SMART health care apps may be slow, but inevitable

by Andrew Oram

This was originally published on O’Reilly Media’s Strata blog, September 13, 2012.

This week has been teaming with health care conferences, particularly in Boston, and was declared by President Obama to be National Health IT Week as well. I chose to spend my time at the second ITdotHealth conference, where I enjoyed many intense conversations with some of the leaders in the health care field, along with news about the SMART Platform at the center of the conference, the excitement of a Clayton Christiansen talk, and the general panache of hanging out at the Harvard Medical School.

SMART, funded by the Office of the National Coordinator in Health and Human Services, is an attempt to slice through the Babel of EHR formats that prevent useful applications from being developed for patient data. Imagine if something like the wealth of mash-ups built on Google Maps (crime sites, disaster markers, restaurant locations) existed for your own health data. This is what SMART hopes to do. They can already showcase some working apps, such as overviews of patient data for doctors, and a real-life implementation of heart disease user interface proposed by David McCandless in WIRED magazine.

Update, Octobe 31: Videos, slides, and othe material from the conference are now online.

The premise and promise of SMART

At this conference, the presentation that gave me the most far-reaching sense of what SMART can do was by Nich Wattanasin, project manager for i2b2 at Partners. His implementation showed SMART not just as an enabler of individual apps, but as an environment where a user could choose the proper app for his immediate needs. For instance, a doctor could use an app to search for patients in the database matching certain characteristics, then select a particular patient and choose an app that exposes certain clinical information on that patient. In this way, SMART an combine the power of many different apps developed in an uncoordinated fashion, and make a comprehensive data analysis platform from them.

Another illustration of the value of SMART came from lead architect Josh Mandel. He pointed out that knowing a child’s blood pressure means little until one runs it through a formula based on the child’s height and age. Current EHRs can show you the blood pressure reading, but none does the calculation that shows you whether it’s normal or dangerous. A SMART app has been developer to do that. (Another speaker claimed that current EHRs in general neglect the special requirements of child patients.)

SMART is a close companion to the Indivo patient health record. Both of these, along with the i2b2 data exchange system, were covered in an article from an earlier conference at the medical school. Let’s see where platforms for health apps are headed.

How far we’ve come

As I mentioned, this ITdotHealth conference was the second to be held. The first took place in September 2009, and people following health care closely can be encouraged by reading the notes from that earlier instantiation of the discussion.

In September 2009, the HITECH act (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) had defined the concept of "meaningful use," but nobody really knew what was expected of health care providers, because the ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services did not release their final Stage 1 rules until more than a year after this conference. Aneesh Chopra, then the Federal CTO, and Todd Park, then the CTO of Health and Human Services, spoke at the conference, but their discussion of health care reform was a "vision." A surprisingly strong statement for patient access to health records was made, but speakers expected it to be accomplished through the CONNECT Gateway, because there was no Direct. (The first message I could find on the Direct Project forum dated back to November 25, 2009.) Participants had a sophisticated view of EHRs as platforms for applications, but SMART was just a "conceptual framework."

So in some ways, ONC, Harvard, and many other contributors to modern health care have accomplished an admirable amount over three short years. But some ways we are frustratingly stuck. For instance, few EHR vendors offer API access to patient records, and existing APIs are proprietary. The only SMART implementation for a commercial EHR mentioned at this week’s conference was one created on top of the Cerner API by outsiders (although Cerner was cooperative). Jim Hansen of Dossia told me that there is little point to encourage programmers to create SMART apps while the records are still behind firewalls.

Keynotes

I couldn’t call a report on ITdotHealth complete without an account of the two keynotes by Christiansen and Eric Horvitz, although these took off in different directions from the rest of the conference and served as hints of future developments.

Christiansen is still adding new twists to the theories laid out in c The Innovator’s Dilemma and other books. He has been a backer of the SMART project from the start and spoke at the first ITdotHealth conference. Consistent with his famous theory of disruption, he dismisses hopes that we can reduce costs by reforming the current system of hospitals and clinics. Instead, he projects the way forward through technologies that will enable less trained experts to successively take over tasks that used to be performed in more high-cost settings. Thus, nurse practitioners will be able to do more and more of what doctors do, primary care physicians will do more of what we current delegate to specialists, and ultimately the patients and their families will treat themselves.

He also has a theory about the progression toward openness. Radically new technologies start out tightly integrated, and because they benefit from this integration they tend to be created by proprietary companies with high profit margins. As the industry comes to understand the products better, they move toward modular, open standards and become commoditized. Although one might conclude that EHRs, which have been around for some forty years, are overripe for open solutions, I’m not sure we’re ready for that yet. That’s because the problems the health care field needs to solve are quite different from the ones current EHRs solve. SMART is an open solution all around, but it could serve a marketplace of proprietary solutions and reward some of the venture capitalists pushing health care apps.

While Christiansen laid out the broad environment for change in health care, Horvitz gave us a glimpse of what he hopes the practice of medicine will be in a few years. A distinguished scientist at Microsoft, Horvitz has been using machine learning to extract patterns in sets of patient data. For instance, in a collection of data about equipment uses, ICD codes, vital signs, etc. from 300,000 emergency room visits, they found some variables that predicted a readmission within 14 days. Out of 10,000 variables, they found 500 that were relevant, but because the relational database was strained by retrieving so much data, they reduced the set to 23 variables to roll out as a product.

Another project predicted the likelihood of medical errors from patient states and management actions. This was meant to address a study claiming that most medical errors go unreported.

A study that would make the privacy-conscious squirm was based on the willingness of individuals to provide location data to researchers. The researchers tracked searches on Bing along with visits to hospitals and found out how long it took between searching for information on a health condition and actually going to do something about it. (Horvitz assured us that personally identifiable information was stripped out.)

His goal is go beyond measuring known variables, and to find new ones that could be hidden causes. But he warned that, as is often the case, causality is hard to prove.

As prediction turns up patterns, the data could become a "fabric" on which many different apps are based. Although Horvitz didn’t talk about combining data sets from different researchers, it’s clearly suggested by this progression. But proper de-identification and flexible patient consent become necessities for data combination. Horvitz also hopes to move from predictions to decisions, which he says is needed to truly move to evidence-based health care.

Did the conference promote more application development?

My impression (I have to admit I didn’t check with Dr. Ken Mandl, the organizer of the conference) was that this ITdotHealth aimed to persuade more people to write SMART apps, provide platforms that expose data through SMART, and contribute to the SMART project in general. I saw a few potential app developers at the conference, and a good number of people with their hands on data who were considering the use of SMART. I think they came away favorably impressed—maybe by the presentations, maybe by conversations that the meeting allowed them to have with SMART developer—so we may see SMART in wider use soon. Participants came far for the conference; I talked to one from Geneva, for instance.

The presentations were honest enough, though, to show that SMART development is not for the faint-hearted. On the supply side—that is, for people who have patient data and want to expose it—you have to create a "container" that presents data in the format expected by SMART. Furthermore, you must make sure the data conforms to industry standards, such as SNOMED for diagnoses. This could be a lot of conversion.

On the application side, you may have to deal with SMART’s penchant for Semantic Web technologies such as OWL and SPARQL. This will scare away a number of developers. However, speakers who presented SMART apps at the conference said development was fairly easy. No one matched the developer who said their app was ported in two days (most of which were spent reading the documentation) but development times could usually be measured in months.

Mandl spent some time airing the idea of a consortium to direct SMART. It could offer conformance tests (but probably not certification, which is a heavy-weight endeavor) and interact with the ONC and standards bodies.

After attending two conferences on SMART, I’ve got the impression that one of its most powerful concepts is that of an "app store for health care applications." But correspondingly, one of the main sticking points is the difficulty of developing such an app store. No one seems to be taking it on. Perhaps SMART adoption is still at too early a stage.

Once again, we are batting our heads up against the walls erected by EHRs to keep data from being extracted for useful analysis. And behind this stands the resistance of providers, the users of EHRs, to give their data to their patients or to researchers. This theme dominated a federal government conference on patient access.

I think SMART will be more widely adopted over time because it is the only useful standard for exposing patient data to applications, and innovation in health care demands these apps. Accountable Care Organizations, smarter clinical trials (I met two representatives of pharmaceutical companies at the conference), and other advances in health care require data crunching, so those apps need to be written. And that’s why people came from as far as Geneva to check out SMART—there’s nowhere else to find what they need. The technical requirements to understand SMART seem to be within the developers’ grasps.

But a formidable phalanx of resistance remains, from those who don’t see the value of data to those who want to stick to limited exchange formats such as CCDs. And as Sean Nolan of Microsoft pointed out, one doesn’t get very far unless the app can fit into a doctor’s existing workflow. Privacy issues were also raised at the conference, because patient fears could stymie attempts at sharing. Given all these impediments, the government is doing what it can; perhaps the marketplace will step in to reward those who choose a flexible software platform for innovation.

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