The Reboot
 This week marks my official return to JASE Health since 2014, when I co-founded Sansoro Health (now Datica). As we reboot the company, JASE Health will embark on vast growth and expansion over the next several years.

JASE Health was founded in 2007, after I left Cerner Corporation. At the time, the vision for JASE Health was to find and secure enough technical professional services work to keep me busy and allow me to be independent (and to make sure my wife didn’t kill me for leaving a good, corporate gig). Pretty simple goal really–stay alive. The technical professional services work was narrowed to a niche focus; namely MillenniumObjects® integration for Cerner customers.

Millennium Objects® was Cerner’s first foray into web services (aka APIs). The XML-based proprietary web services offered a powerful way for health IT software vendors to integration through reading, writing, updating and inactivating patient activity data within the Millennium® platform. Much like today, many vendors sought for a better way to seamlessly integrate with electronic medical record (EMR) systems. My goal was to use my knowledge of the Millennium® system and MillenniumObjects® and work closely with vendors to help with their overall EMR integration strategy.

My first project was with a company called Intellidot (now PatientSafe Solutions). They needed to integrate their bedside medication administration handheld solution in a way that allowed electronic medication administration record (eMAR) updates to feed back into Millennium®, which would avoid dual entry and prevent clinical users from having to document on the client desktop device (cumbersome). The handheld could scan the patient, medication and clinician, and verify that the medication given was ordered and on the patient’s medication profile. I’m grossly oversimplifying their product, but the point is, their solution needed real-time, read and write access to Cerner in order to achieve their goals. I worked with PatientSafe’s product and development teams for several months and went live at the first site in Oklahoma.

I am happy to report that the Oklahoma site is still live and I still do work with PatientSafe, even as I type this post. The nature of the engagement ebbs and flows depends on the company’s priorities, but overall, JASE Health helps with EMR integration strategy, and in some cases, dive deeper with product roadmap and architecture design. Just like the PatientSafe example, JASE effectively points companies in the right direction from a strategic perspective and explains what is possible in terms of seamless EMR integration. Finally, we help them execute and to become self-sufficient operationally.

Since PatientSafe, JASE has helped several companies with similar technical challenges, with use cases ranging from patient portal, view-only access to embedded launch of 3rd party workflow inside the framework of the EMR. It doesn’t matter what the use case is; only that data is needed to and from the EHR system or the ability to launch a 3rd party app in both patient and user context.

My return to JASE Health does not mean we’re going to deviate from the kind of work described above. In fact, JASE’s reboot will reinforce the work health care so desperately needs. We will expand on the kinds of technologies available. For example, MillenniumObjects® still exists, but we have not done a MillenniumObjects® project in several years because newer approaches exist, like FHIR resources offered by the EMR vendors or proprietary methods, like Datica’s Emissary® middleware API for EMR systems. The challenges for vendors remain the same, but the mechanisms for how to solve those challenges now focus on technologies available in 2019 and where the market is headed in the years to come.  The reality is standards like SMART and FHIR will continue to emerge, but the state of those standards are not enough for vendors to do the kind of integration needed today. JASE will help identify the right combination of technology solutions to achieve optimal integration.

From our humble beginnings in 2007 with a niche focus on Cerner & MillenniumObject® to where we are today with a focus on Epic, MEDITECH, Allscripts, Cerner, Athena, eClinicalWorks, Nextgen along with technologies like SMART, FHIR, HL7, EMR framework alerts, SAML, OAuth, etc., we’re very excited about our ability to continue making a profound difference in healthcare. Over the next several months, JASE will announce expanded technical services.