Leveraging FHIR to Integrate Activity Data with Electronic Health Record

Health technology wearables can quantify and visualize an individual’s physical activity and any other associated data (e.g., vitals, calories, steps, distance, etc.) across time. Currently, this data is communicated to the wearable’s organization data repositories and is accessible to the individual via a mobile application. However, the data cannot be integrated with the individual’s EHR due to structural and semantic interoperability issues and experts relying on EHRs don’t have a complete view of the individual’s health, activity data along with other health records, to provide better healthcare outcomes. This issue is due to the inability of the existing healthcare standards to capture and share the activity and its associated data with any healthcare information systems, such as an EHR. The goal of this research is to addresses this issue by leveraging the HL7 FHIR standard to design an interoperable entity that will allow us to integrate activity and its associated data with an EHR. The research design is implemented using the HL7 FHIR Java-based implementation, REST web service, OpenEMR, and tested using widely used wearables.