To support a flexible health information technology (IT) environment and promote innovation, Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have developed a healthcare platform architecture. The funding to develop this architecture has come through a grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
According to a press release, the SMArt (Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies) platform and interface are being made publicly available to kick off the start of a $5,000 competition challenging developers to make Web applications that offer specific functionality for patients, physicians, or for public health.
The SMArt architecture is an "iPhone-like" health IT platform model that aspires to change the way health IT supports healthcare by simplifying the development of medical applications that are scalable and substitutable. This will drive competition, innovation, and increased efficiency in the functionality of technology for improved healthcare. ONC awarded $15 million to the project in April 2010 through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program.
Dr. Kenneth Mandl of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School, and co-leader on the SMArt project stated that the goal of this model is to enable a substantial shift towards technologies that are flexible and able to quickly adapt to meet the various needs of their users on a variety of devices.
Dr. Mandl and Dr. Isaac Kohane, also of CHIP, Harvard Medical School and co-leader on the SMArt project, held a SMArt Developer Meeting which included more than 60 representatives from academia, government and business
The SMArt project will enable the equivalent of an iTunes App Store for health and support an ecosystem of applications ranging from medication managers for patients at home to e-prescribing applications and decision support for physicians in the office.
Mandira Srivastava is a HealthTechZone contributor. She works as a full-time writer, ghostwriter and blogger, and has more than two years of experience in print and Web media. She has also worked on company brochures, website content and product descriptions, as well as proofreading and editing content. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Tammy Wolf
