DrChrono Inc., the company enabling the medical practice of the future, today announced new features and functionality to its free Application Programming Interface (API) allowing customers and developers to create applications that enhance the DrChrono platform as well as create third-party healthcare industry applications. Thousands of developers are registered on the DrChrono platform leveraging its API such as customers like Calyx Health who have development teams along with tech startups like Calibrater Health.
“We have made great strides over the years with our API and want developers to be able to build on a healthcare platform without an access setup fee. Developers can easily access our API and build on top of DrChrono to create unique applications that can significantly improve the user experience for medical professionals, practices and patients in healthcare,” said Daniel Kivatinos, COO and Co-Founder of DrChrono. “DrChrono’s API support team also works closely with our developer community to bring them the highest level of service that they need to build their apps.”
California-based clinic Calyx Health in Alameda is exclusively for Medicare seniors and has its own developer team. “We evaluated a lot of EHRs and chose DrChrono because of its ease of use, impressive API capabilities, and devotion to the developer experience. Their engineering team worked hard to provide the features we needed to integrate our own technology, including an easy to use app geared towards Medicare seniors, into the EHR,” said Kevin Matulef, Chief Technology Officer of Calyx Health. “Using the new clinical notes feature, we can now merge patient data directly into the same spot where the physician is taking notes. This saves our providers from toggling back and forth between screens, and allows them to produce more accurate and comprehensive documentation with much less work.”
“Integrating with the DrChrono APIs has been a breeze,” said Tim Dybvig, CEO of Calibrater Health, a new developer partner offering text-based patient engagement solutions. “The documentation is great and their team is super responsive – we’re already in direct contact with the developer API team should we need change requests in the future. This was our quickest partnership launch to date and we’re very happy to be working with DrChrono.”
On average, DrChrono’s API interacts 32 million times per month with its partners’ application or a customer’s in-house application. An API call is a two-way exchange when the application requests or pushes data to the DrChrono platform, for example, when one appointment is created or one patient chart is updated. With the help of the DrChrono’s API developers and the apps they created, an impressive number of API calls are recorded on DrChrono’s platform.
How the Healthcare API Works:
DrChrono’s free API allows all types of developers to easily build software to interface with the platform. Developers can create new ways to interact with medical professionals, patients, and stakeholders in the healthcare industry. Developers can use the API and SDK with simple setup and powerful functionality to create unique third-party applications that leverage DrChrono’s health data, EHR, practice management and medical billing platform. It boasts a number of endpoints and developers can use any HTTP client in any programming language to build their app. DrChrono also provides a devoted API support team to help developers grow and improve their app. To get started, visit www.drchrono.com/api and click “Start Building.”
Highlights of DrChrono’s new upgraded Medical API features and functionality:
- Webhooks – Webhooks are notification system for changes. A Webhook event proactively tells an app that a status changes or something new is added. For example, the Webhook would be an event that tells the app a new appointment was created for this patient and includes the details. Webhooks are one-way events from the DrChrono server to a developer’s server and DrChrono’s servers triggers the exchange.
- Clinical Notes Endpoints – This allows medical notes and ‘Read and Write’ data available all in one place when provider is seeing patient. Clinical Notes is a visit summary that a doctor uses to bill and a part of the permanent medical history for the patient. In few cases, it can also be provided to the patient. ‘Read and Write’ clinical note information allows applications to retrieve key findings plus write to the Clinical Note itself.
- FHIR – FHIR is an interoperability standard that regulates certain API features across healthcare applications. DrChrono implemented this first in the patient health record onpatient, which allows patients to extract data from their accounts and potentially build applications around that data. More can be found here on the patient FHIR API.
- Billing Endpoints – DrChrono’s Billing Endpoints allow a practice to report more effectively and connect with external advanced reporting solutions, which may aggregate other platforms. For example, a practice can now add charges to an appointment, add payments to an appointment, see the insurance breakdown and reasons for adjustments, rejection, denial and lastly see which payments are designated for which charges.
- CQM Endpoints – This new feature allows DrChrono’s user base to efficiently manage their MIPS compliance. CQMs are part of MIPS, a healthcare incentive program included in the government’s initiative for “Value Based Care.” MIPS is an Overall Incentive Program, which gives providers a +/- % boost/penalty of their Medicare Part B payments based on their score.
- Custom Appointment Fields Endpoints – This is a new field that allows DrChrono users and partners to implement custom workflows. If there’s a custom attribute for an appointment that’s not inherent to the DrChrono platform, for example, data that another application records, then a practice can use ‘Write’ to this endpoint to make the DrChrono compatible with another application or workflow. An example of a custom workflow would be if a medical professional wants follow-up instructions in the appointment page, not in a note or task, they can now implement that using Custom Appointment Fields.
- Labs API Endpoints – DrChrono has read and write endpoints enabled to give power to any lab development team who is looking to place structured lab data right into the platform. Health tech startups are leveraging the DrChrono lab API to build modern lab workflows right into the EHR empowering providers to place orders and receive structured lab data right back into the EHR.
- Tasks API Endpoints – For customers and developers alike who want to build sophisticated flows into DrChrono, they can do that now via tasks. For example, if a customer creates an interaction inside or outside of DrChrono, they can build additional flows with reminders and what to do next and put that task right into the staff and providers “Tasks” to do list.
About DrChrono
DrChrono focuses on bringing the medical practice of the future to reality; the company built the first iPad EHR. DrChrono creates the best electronic health record, practice management, medical billing and revenue cycle management experience for physicians and patients; the medical platform was built for iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and the web. The EHR includes customizable medical forms, e-prescribing, real-time patient eligibility checks, patient portal, check-in app and more. The DrChrono healthcare App Directory offers a multitude of apps that a practice can select from and an open medical API for healthcare app developers. For more information about drchrono, visit www.drchrono.com
