Akido Labs (YC W15) Provides an API Layer for Hospital App Developers | Hacker News Reader

Akido Labs (YC W15) Provides an API Layer for Hospital App Developers

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Jared Goodner here (cofounder of Akido) - We're super excited to see what the HN crowd can do with a RESTful API for hospital data! Check out our first blog post for some very simple examples.

https://www.akidolabs.com/blog/hello-world

What do you think of Apervita.com, which is also a platform for working with EHR?

They seem to want "health authors" (developers/scientists) to use their "authoring environment" (locked in IDE/language... wow) to build "insights" (apps) that are locked into their market.

I don't understand the virtue of that model unless they think that they can achieve a monopoly on a lot of data. Is it possible they can?

Hey @falsestprophet, thanks for reaching out!

I had been introduced to Apervita a little while back, and while I found it intriguing, it didn't solve the problem I was looking to solve. From my perspective, the biggest problem in healthcare right now is the lack of interoperability between systems -- data within a hospital is frankly rather locked up, inaccessible by reasonable means. This holds back a TON of much needed innovation in the space.

If Apertiva's platform is a means for spurring innovation, then I'm all for it. My prediction is that health data access will hold them back, until Akido is in every hospital across the country ;)

I believe they are integrating with hospital systems and standardizing data just like Akido presumably with the goal of getting into every hospital just like you.

I'm sure both Apervita and Akido would love to have a monopoly on the data and hospital network, but it doesn't seem like that is a guaranteed outcome. (So this is perhaps merely a very good business rather than an amazing business.)

But, instead of simply offering an API like you they want developers/scientists/doctors to build on a proprietary platform for a proprietary market on top of their proprietary API.

So they're Akido + Google App Engine + Google Play for health.

These guys raised $18 million, so some serious people believe in the company. But, I just don't understand the virtue of trying to lock all customers into their "Google App Engine + Google Play".

No one in their mind would build a business on that if they could go with a more open alternative, right? And now you are an alternative.

Though I think it would be pretty cool if you guys had an added offering that made it easy for hospitals to buy little apps... um I guess something like Apervita. :)

@falsestprophet -- we are right with you on being anti-vendor lock in and supporting open standards. We want to enable healthcare systems to use their data in whatever way they'd like and we think the best way to do that is to keep everything as open and as standards driven as possible.

RE: Hospital apps, couldn't agree more. Keep an eye out!

I just went to the Dr this morning and the prognosis was their systems are horrible and just getting worse... Apparently the Allscripts program they use gets really really slow about once a week and is generally over capacity.

It was neat that they could pull up some records from a hospital visit from a few years ago but generally it was really painful to watch. On the drive back I was thinking to myself "YC should invest in as many EHR companies as possible." Your service seems very interesting and immediately reminded me of what easypost.com is doing for shipping providers which I also love. We ship out a bit of hardware to go with our software and the shipping APIs are a huge mess too and most existing solutions need tweaked to the point where eventually you will need to do some integration work to get the efficiencies you want. I assume it's the same or worse in the EHR space. Nice work.

Hey @andymoe, thanks for your comment and your kind words!

You're absolutely right that EHR's have a whole host of problems that could be solved by smart app developers! There's a ton of opportunity unlocked by providing safe and developer friendly access to health data.

Jared, Glad to see you guys are doing something different in this space! Congratulations.

Will your software allow someone to integrate with Clinics/Hospitals now without have any relationship with them? Is it sufficient to just integrate with your APIs and be able to get our user's health data from the clinics/hospitals you support?

Hey James, that's a great question - the answer is that in order to access data from any health system, you'll need their OK.

Akido does make it much much easier for them to say OK, though :). While the API makes it far easier on developers, the hospital/clinic gets a far more secure means of transmitting data to vendors, as well as very fine grained control over who has access to which data, and detailed logs of every request.

Speaking as a physician, I'm deeply heartened by any attention to health care software from outside of the entrenched players.

Most current EMRs are execrable. Their difficulty is not only frustrating and user-hostile, but potentially unsafe.

@phren0logy We hear you!!

The Akido API was influenced by our experience as directors of Univ. Southern California's D-Health digital health lab, where we constantly work with physicians and admins to create better health IT software.

We saw that real innovation and improvement in health IT is prevented by an extremely laborious and difficult "integration" process. We built Akido to make sure it was the last solution to ever had to get "integrated"!

This is cool! I couldn't quite tell from the article, but do you see this as an alternative to Prime and, if so, how is it different?

EDIT: One more question: the article says you've reached 200 hospitals already. That's impressive. Are those signed contracts? Or verbal commitments? Can you say a little about how you achieved that?

Good luck at demo day too!

Thanks, @brandonb!! We think so too ;) We are seeing far more traction than we expected - we're solving a very serious need!

Please shoot me an email at jared@akidolabs.com -- happy to talk more about it.

Is Akido something like BlueButton+ [1] but which is used (about to be used) by real EHR systems at real hospitals?

If yes, I'd love to give it a try.

[1] http://bluebuttonplus.org/

Thanks for your question, @smanuel! It's a good one!

At this point in time, we're focused more on software/device vendor integrations into healthcare systems. However, this strategy is aimed at eventually making personal health records a reality.

With blue button, health providers weren't incentivized to adopt - it's just not a high priority for health systems right now. However, if we could solve the integration problem for health systems while paving the way towards personal health records incentive won't be an issue. The FHIR specs are the latest step in the right direction! (We're big proponents of FHIR)

Akido holds real promise to enable personal health records in the near future -- be on the look out!

Congratulations! A welcome change in healthcare.

Are you building a relationship with the hospitals and clinics so that we wont't have to talk to them, but just use your api to get and push our patient's data?

Hey @c0mpute - that's a very good question!

We are building relationships with health systems across the country, but we can't remove the need for you to talk to them. What Akido does is make integration a non-issue - we turn integration into 'plug n play' from the developer's and hospital's perspective. What this means for you is that your sale to the hospital or clinic decision maker becomes far easier!

Please do note that the health system maintains all control over who has access to data -- this is VERY sensitive data, and it's extremely important that access is tightly controlled, logged, and auditable. (Akido handles all of that for the hospital)

When I put in my email and click 'Get Early Access', nothing happens and the following is printed to the console (Firefox 36.0.1):

TypeError: t.toElement is undefined [developers.js:1:31160]

Is Akido Labs meant to be hired by hospitals to support easier integration with vendors? Or meant to be used by HIT vendors to more easily offer integration with different hospitals?

Hey @joshpadnick, great question - It's both!

On one hand, Akido is a technology + service that offloads the entire integration process for application vendors (analytics, patient engagement, scheduling, etc!), lab/diagnostics vendors, and connected hardware vendors.

On the other hand, hospitals have a solution for integration that provides more granular control over their data, and a far smoother integration process.

I'd also like to add that it's a free platform for health systems :).

To clarify a bit, a hospital or clinic wouldn't really "hire" us -- Akido is software that's implemented on-site or in the cloud, and is supported remotely.

Looks awesome!

If the Healthcare provider EHR is already compatible with FHIR. What incentive do I have to use your API? Are you also hosting the Healthcare and patient data?

Nice Work!

I am part of a startup that needs this like yesterday.

Who can I email regarding this?

Hey @up_and_up - would love to learn more about how you could use Akido! Shoot me an email at jared@akidolabs.com and let's set aside a time for a call/skype/coffee (depending on where you live)!

Is this supposed to replace an existing LIMS or be an API Layer over your existing LIMS?

Hey @buckbova, thanks for your question!!

Akido doesn't actually replace anything - it's an API layer that lives above any electronic health record (EHR) system, and provides a far more developer-friendly and secure means for accessing data than the current state.

Feel free to check out our docs to see what you can do with less than 10 lines of code!

https://portal.akidolabs.com/v1.0/docs/getting-started

Do you have a list of supported EMRs and how does the API communicate with the EMR?

Is this a sort of translation from HL7 to web services API?

Edit:

I found the list of EHR software on the site.

In my experience working with a variety of these types of software is they are all differently difficult and constantly changing. Ones like Cerner can be completely driven by HL7, although not all are like this.

Will this be all hosted in the cloud, or on-site, or both with some "connector" software? What's the cost structure and set-up fees like? Do you have any customers yet?

Edit Edit:

I'm not exactly in the market for this, even though I'd love an API to sit over all the systems we have already integrated including one large COTS LIMS system, a custom LIMS built from scratch, and a third-party cloud system all communicating via web services with varying degrees of functionality.

I had stepped away from my computer (sorry!) - to answer your questions:

YES - it's a real pain to deal with all the different interfaces and techniques required to obtain the data that you need.

However, as part of implementing Akido, we handle all of the integration and maintenance for you (it's our expertise ;) )

We can implement on an on-site Virtual Machine, or as a cloud implementation (our preference, of course).

Our cost structure is flexible at the moment (so we should talk), but it's worth saying that we're a low-cost solution!

Hey @buckbova, Akido actually isn't dependent on the EHR vendor. Nonetheless, here's a short list on our hospital page:

https://www.akidolabs.com/hospitals

Akido handles all aspects of integration for you -- we essentially offload the whole process! We can accept data from just about any interface - HL7 feed, CSV over SFTP, CCD, etc.

Please feel free to shoot me a note at jared@akidolabs.com to set up a time to chat!!

This feels pretty similar to Moxe Health, the Rock Health portfolio company.

Hi @lyyons, we are certainly not the first ones to spot that integration is a pain point for hospitals and we have tons of respect for anyone trying to help solve this problem. Its a big issue and there is a lot of work to be done. While we do share common features with Moxe Health and others, what sets us apart is our origins from an academic medical center, our commitment to supporting open standards and our mission to enable hospitals to fully own and innovate with their health data.

The demo widget doesn't work for me. It just says "null".

Hi @unclesaamm -- Hugh Gordon here (another cofounder).

Thanks for pointing this out! We've fixed the site. Please let us know if you are having other problems and thanks for checking us out :)

How does it compare with SMART/FHIR ?

Great question, @yumraj - you can think of Akido as the infrastructure required to run SMART on FHIR. Kind of like Heroku is to Rails, Akido is to SMART on FHIR.

Make sense?

Their API is a FHIR implementation.

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