Greenway Health APIs - An Overview

Introduction

The Greenway Health Developer Platform enables you to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to build and deploy applications that work with clinical data stored in Greenway Health electronic health record (EHR) systems, such as Intergy and Prime Suite. These applications can be embedded inside the EHR, taking advantage of user and patient context, to provide clinicians with functionality at the point of care, or they can function on their own to provide functionality directly to users, independent of the EHR.

Greenway Health offers developers two APIs to connect to and interact with our products; a standards-compliant FHIR R4 API, as well as our proprietary GAPI. Documentation and tools supporting both are accessible right here on the Developer Platform.

What is an API and why would I use one?

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software.

From a healthcare perspective, patients or healthcare providers (such as doctors, nurses. etc.) can use apps that communicate via an API to connect to the provider’s medical practice data.

If you are a patient and a developer, you might have an idea for an app that you want to build for your own use to consolidate and or analyze your own medical data. Or perhaps there is an app out there that you want to use or adapt. As a patient of a provider that uses a Greenway EHR such as Intergy or Prime Suite, you can use your Greenway Patient Portal (GPP) or SmartHub login credentials to register here on the Developer Platform to learn the FHIR API and build your own application. When you run your application, you use your GPP/Smarthub login to enable your app to access your own data stored in your medical record via the FHIR API.

If you are a clinician and/or developer that uses of one of our EHR products in your practice, an API enables you to build applications that enable capabilities like syndromic surveillance, clinical registry reporting, population health, connect internal applications and much more. To build and add your own apps using the FHIR API, you use your Greenway Identity Services login to register here on the Developer Platform. The apps you publish will be visible to users inside your practices. Your users then use their Greenway Identify Services login to use your application to access your practice data via the FHIR API.

If you are a Greenway partner and/or a 3rd party developer writing new applications or adapting them to our platform, you can obtain your own login by registering on the Greenway Health Developer Platform and you can submit your app for addition to our App Gallery. Once your app is published, Greenway EHR users and Patients use their Greenway Identity Services logins to access their clinical data.

As previously stated, Greenway Healthcare has two APIs, described below.

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)

FHIR is a Standards-based API. The API uses FHIR Release 4 and is consistent for all of our EHR products. Our FHIR endpoints serve data from Greenway's core products, Intergy and Prime Suite.

In FHIR, all data entities are called Resources.

FHIR resources are structured in a familiar way - using nomenclature that is familiar to both clinicians and developers; nearly all of which is linked to a patient, which is expressed as a Patient resource.

The image below (published by the HL7 FHIR project), illustrates the different clinical resources that a FHIR server can support such as Allergy, Care Plan/Goal, Family History, and so on. Greenway's FHIR API provides a subset of these resources that is compliant with the 21^st Century Cures Act requirements. Over time, support for more FHIR resources will be added to the platform.

FHIR uses a REST (Representational State Transfer) API model that maps the different API transactions, such as creates, reads, updates, and deletes (developers affectionately refer to these actions as 'CRUD' operations), directly to HTTP methods like POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE. (Note: The current Greenway FHIR API supports read operations only at the present time.)

To facilitate the authentication apps and users to the FHIR API, the SMART-on-FHIR standard is used. SMART-on-FHIR uses the OAuth2 standard.

Greenway API (GAPI)

The Greenway API is a Proprietary API with separate and distinct API calls and data structures for each of our EHR products.

The GAPI supports reads and writes across a variety of clinical and financial data elements.

The Developer Platform

This platform is a central location where developers can learn about our API offerings and create applications.

Navigating within the Greenway Health Developer Platform is easy. In the top navigation bar, there are four links that take you to key areas.

FHIR Dashboard – Once you register as a developer, this area enables you to immediately begin building and deploying SMART-on-FHIR applications.
GAPI Dashboard – Our existing GAPI dashboard accessible to Marketplace partners and clients.
API Documentation – Technical information that describes our APIs. (No registration login is required to view our documentation.)
App Gallery – An application catalog for SMART-on-FHIR applications.