A MOBILE APPLICATION ACCESSING PATIENTS’ HEALTH RECORDS THROUGH A REST API - How REST-Style Architecture can Help Speed up the Development of Mobile Health Care Applications
François Andry, Lin Wan, Daren Nicholson · 2011
Mobile devices offer new ways for users to access health care data and services in a secure and user-friendly environment. These new applications must be easy to create, deploy, test and maintain, and they must rely on a scalable and easily integrated infrastructure. In this paper we present the motivations and technical choices for creating a REST API integrated with a mobile application (iPhone/iPad) that offer physicians, access to their patients’ health records via a community, regional or state Health Information Exchange (HIE). We describe the architecture of the system, including how we address security and privacy concerns, the REST API operations and HL7 subset data format used for lab results and observations. We also explain why the early use of unit tests and integration tests were essential to the success of the project.