Safe Health Systems Showcases Innovation at HL7® FHIR® Connectathons

As the year comes to a close, Safe Health Systems, Inc. (Safe Health) celebrates an incredible year of progress and innovation, highlighted by its participation in two prestigious HL7® FHIR® Connectathons. In May, Safe Health demonstrated the initial implementation of the OpenCDx platform and its groundbreaking Form Builder capabilities in Austin, TX. Building on this momentum, the team showcased further advancements and new features during the September Connectathon in Atlanta, GA, collaborating with industry leaders to drive the future of interoperability. 

At the May Connectathon, Safe Health unveiled the initial implementation of the innovative Form Builder, a powerful tool within the OpenCDx project. This feature allows for the creation of customized forms that are directly integrated with the IKM (Integrated Knowledge Management) system and collect data directly in ANF (Analyzed Normalized Format), thus ensuring high-quality and standardized inputs from the start. By pre-normalizing the content submitted, the Form Builder streamlines data processing and enhances its utility for robust public health research, enabling more accurate and actionable insights. This demonstration highlighted Safe Health’s commitment to advancing interoperability and fostering a data-driven approach to improving healthcare outcomes.

At the September Connectathon, Safe Health demonstrated the capabilities of its Analytical Data Repository (ADR), a key component of the OpenCDx project. Developed in collaboration with Safe Health Systems, Inc. and the FDA/HHS, the ADR serves as a standardized, interoperable platform for aggregating and querying clinical data. Its purpose is to help healthcare providers, public health authorities, and researchers efficiently access, analyze, and derive insights from clinical data gathered across diverse healthcare systems. The ADR serves as a standardized, interoperable platform for aggregating and querying clinical data. Its purpose is to help healthcare providers, public health authorities, and researchers efficiently access, analyze, and derive insights from clinical data gathered across diverse healthcare systems.

In recent years, the availability and use of electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical data repositories have significantly increased. However, integrating and normalizing these diverse data sources remains a challenge. The ADR addresses this by leveraging the ANF standard, harmonizing disparate medical terminologies into a unified structure to facilitate accurate, comprehensive data analysis.

In preparation for both Connectathons, the OpenCDx and ADR platforms underwent enhancements to support a variety of clinical use cases following umbrella clinical narratives, as defined by the FDA team. These use cases enabled a demonstration of how Public Health researchers could fine-tune their search parameters and conduct A/B queries—a method that compares two different sets of data to evaluate outcomes, similar to A/B testing used in product development. The implemented functionality, for example, allows researchers to compare the performance of different Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) devices during public health emergencies, providing valuable data for real-time decision-making.