Sansoro Health Record API Will Unite Them All

After some seven years of watching the US government push interoperability among health records, and hearing how far we are from achieving it, I assumed that fundamental divergences among electronic health records at different sites posed problems of staggering complexity. I pricked up my ears, therefore, when John Orosco, CTO of Sansoro Health, said that they could get EHRs to expose real-time web services in a few hours, or at most a couple days.

John OroscoWhat does Sansoro do? Its goal, like the FHIR standard, is to give health care providers and third-party developers a single go-to API where they can run their apps on any supported EHR. Done right, this service cuts down development costs and saves the developers from having to distribute a different version of their app for different customers. Note that the SMART project tries to achieve a similar goal by providing an API layer on top of EHRs for producing user interfaces, whereas Sansoro offers an API at a lower level on particular data items, like FHIR.

Sansoro was formed in the summer of 2014. Researching EHRs, its founders recognized that even though the vendors differed in many superficial ways (including the purportedly standard CCDs they create), all EHRs dealt at bottom with the same fields. Diagnoses, lab orders, allergies, medications, etc. are the same throughout the industry, so familiar items turn up under the varying semantics...