Thanks for the getting back Lloyd!
we don’t see a strong need to expand into general purchasing/procurement capability, though if there’s a significant desire for it, we could theoretically bring it into scope.
I would humbly suggest that there is broad desire (motivated by cost pressure and revenue opportunities) for Health Care Orgs to streamline the Procurement of Facility Supplies as well as directly filling Patient Orders or Referrals that are Reimbursed via Patient Insurance and/or out-of-pocket.
I have worked for a number of Medical Supply Distributors that are also under pressure to provide Automated/Electronic integration for Ordering Supply Products, DME, Prescribed Products, etc…
EHR/EMR, Practice Mgt Software, Procurement Hubs, are all being enhanced to support Procurement workflows for Facility Supplies, Patient Products, and Insurance Billing.
So i definitely see desire to standardize this type of integration/workflow.
I’m currently part of a team for a Medical Supply Org, and i have been asked to create a REST(ish) API for these usecases.
Previously we have used EDI and CXML for the Facility Supplies scenarios, and a combination of Custom-XML/CSV-Protocols and HL7 for the Insurance Billable ordering (HL7 segments we use include ORC, PID, RQD, IN1, DG1, ZW1, etc…).
Looking forward, i would really prefer if our new REST API was either conformant to FHIR, or easily mapped to FHIR, or at the very least i would like our API to be semantically consistent with the FHIR model where there is overlap.
Question?
As i move forward to spec an API to handle these usecase, if i intend to be consistent with the current FHIR model, would this Forum be the appropriate place to post work-in-progress for feedback (even if FHIR decides that Procurement will remain out-of-scope for the official API)?
Maybe you guys could consider a “sandbox” for API Vendor Extensions?
Thank you for your help.
Marko.
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