Case Studies

Users of certified APIs across the healthcare IT ecosystem have come forward with their stories.

Accelerating Clinical Trial Recruitment with Bulk FHIR
Efficient Value Based Care with Bulk FHIR
Scaling Research Data Access Statewide with Bulk FHIR
Re-imagining Public Health Monitoring with Bulk FHIR

Accelerating Clinical Trial Recruitment with Bulk FHIR

Identifying eligible patients for clinical trials can be challenging due to complex inclusion and exclusion criteria requiring detailed patient data. Leveraging Bulk FHIR APIs streamlines this process by enabling efficient data extraction across multiple criteria. An early experience integrating Bulk FHIR demonstrated that well-implemented standards significantly simplify interoperability, reduce setup complexity, and reliably support comprehensive data exports. Clear documentation, straightforward workflows, and reliable system performance are key factors determining the success of Bulk FHIR implementations. This use case highlights the broader opportunity for healthcare providers and EHR vendors to adopt standardized Bulk FHIR approaches to improve clinical trial recruitment and operational efficiency.

Efficient Value Based Care with Bulk FHIR

Providence provides a comprehensive range of health and social services across Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Washington with 125,000 caregivers in 51 hospitals and 1,014 clinics. As a participant in 150 Value-Based Care (VBC) contracts it is imperative for the organization to efficiently share supplemental clinical quality and coding data with payer partners. Epic’s Bulk FHIR API should represent an ideal approach to tackling this standardized data exchange need. However, in practice, Providence found that performance was not comparable to proprietary Epic approaches, and that even making thousands of individual requests to Epic’s FHIR API and compiling the Bulk export files in software was more performant than making a single FHIR Bulk Export request to Epic’s API and relying on Epic’s Bulk FHIR implementation. Furthermore Providence noted that better, standards based approaches to managing groups of patients associated with a payer organization in Epic are needed.

Scaling Research Data Access Statewide with Bulk FHIR

Regenstrief Institute implemented a Bulk FHIR interface to provide access for research data on top of an existing data warehouse, the Indiana Network for Patient Care, which contains 16 billion data elements from more than 100 hospital systems and tens of thousands of providers across the state. The success of this system highlights the ability of sophisticated organizations to build software that leverages open standards to share data. Taking advantage of standards provided by data partners with a well defined data dictionary, standard data quality and characterization tooling, standard data anonymization tooling, pre-written software libraries in many languages, and the ability to easily integrate data from diverse sources. The Bulk FHIR export performance Regenstrief was able to achieve with a relatively small investment in software development highlights the opportunity for EHR vendors who have deployed far less performant interfaces to improve the FHIR experience for their customers.

Re-imagining Public Health Monitoring with Bulk FHIR

In early 2023, Washington University School of Medicine began implementing Bulk FHIR to demonstrate modern, automated public health monitoring capabilities. Bulk FHIR appeared ideally suited to this task, given its capacity to handle population-level data efficiently and support timely data queries critical for public health surveillance and AI-driven analytics. However, practical experience with our electronic health record system’s Bulk FHIR implementation revealed significant technical limitations, hindering its immediate utility and necessitating interim workarounds.