Main features:

SMART on FHIR utlizes OAuth2 for authorization ensuring users can securely delegate the correct access rights to external applications while ensuring proper authentication

SMART on FHIR also provides a standardized framework for applications to be launched from within an EHR system.

Users like patients and practitioners can grant fine-granular access to specific FHIR resources from the EHR via so-called scopes.

Use cases

For applications that are patient-facing SMART allows users to access any personal health information and to view items such as their health records and their current or previous medications.

Healthcare provider facing applications (E.g. Care management, clinical documentation or decision support) can benefit from SMART.

Healthcare analysis applications that work with large data sets to improve healthcare outcomes also utilize the underlying features of SMART.

Benefits

Interoperability: By leveraging FHIR, SMART on FHIR promotes interoperability across different healthcare systems.

Flexibility: The substitutable nature of SMART applications means that healthcare providers can choose from a wide variety of apps that best meet their needs.

Security: Built-in security protocols ensure that patient data is protected and only accessible by authorized parties.

Implementation challenges

If the underlying EHR data is incomplete or inaccurate, the SMART framework cannot easily solve problems related to poor data quality in the source systems.

The real-time nature of SMART on FHIR places significant demand on server resources and this volume of usage can create performance issues.

Selecting the right FHIR server from the start can be critical to long term success. Firely Server is one solution that can easily scale to handle growing usage.

Integrating with legacy systems that do not support SMART on FHIR (still commonplace right across the healthcare sector) can be difficult.

SMART on Firely Server

Firely Server fully supports the syntax of SMART v1. All Firely Server packages also support the syntax of SMART v2 scopes. All search capabilities supported by Firely Server can also be evaluated as part of the access scope using SMART v2. Chaining and Reverse Chaining is explicitly supported.