Efficient Information Retrieval from Electronic Health Records with Simple Web API and Its Use

Abstract

　Recently, many services and applications have Web API for making use of their data from external systems. Web API allows external systems to access data with general HTTP requests and to receive them in machine readable format like JSON. Since this method is useful for retrieving data from EMR, HL7 FHIR, openEHR and other standards adopt Web API as their data exchange interfaces. However, in our hospital, we cannot use these standards or Web APIs on the EMR system because it doesn’t implement these standards and APIs. Moreover, the specifications of these standards are too large to implement by ourselves.

　Therefore, we implemented our own simple Web API to retrieve necessary data directly from the EMR’s database. As a result of implementing the Web API, it became easy to retrieve several EMR’s data from its database and we have been able to use them in some applications efficiently. In conclusion, Web API is useful as a data exchange interface and we would like to demand that future EMR systems implement standards like HL7 FHIR or OpenEHR, and the function that allows users to define which data can be retrieved with Web API.