Integrating Physical Activity Data with Electronic Health Record

Abstract

Wearables allow individuals to track, analyze, and visualize their physical activities and associated data such as vitals, activity information, etc. across time. But, none of this activity data is anywhere to be found in an electronic health record - the primary source of patient medical data for the healthcare providers. This inability doesn’t allow experts to view the complete health summary of an individual and also, activity data can play a key role in healthcare decisions. This problem is due to the lack of standards that can capture activity data from disparate sources (e.g., wearables, smart watches, trackers, etc.) and integrate it with an EHR. This research article identifies and provides a detailed analysis of the key factors contributing to the problem. Based on the detailed analysis, we design an interoperable model by leveraging HL7 FHIR standard to capture activity data from wearables and develop it using FHIR HAPI - an implementation of HL7 FHIR. This initial prototype is tested by capturing Fitbit data and integrating it with OpenEMR - an open source EHR.