If you want new digital-health experiences, start connecting apps

SAN FRANCISCO — Engineers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have found a way to let clinicians use the pagers they’ve long trusted while also opening up access to sensitive information on iOS devices.

Drawing on MuleSoft’s application-integration tools, the university’s technical staff wove together electronic health records, demographic figures, and information on hospital staffers assigned to patients, all atop the Salesforce1 platform.

The resulting CareWeb application continues to earn high marks from people at the university’s Center for Digital Health Innovation.

“Is this an improvement on what we’ve had before? The answer is a resounding yes,” Ed Martin, the center’s digital architect, said today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference.

Stepping back, the application goes beyond just allowing health-care professionals to use more contemporary devices to do their jobs. It gives patients ways to access current information. And ease of integration could mean the addition of more data sources, not to mention wider usage of the information.

UCSF researchers have recently been working with Samsung on clinical studies that could demonstrate the value of certain kinds of Samsung devices.

“In order to make these innovations happen in medical institutions, you’ve got to have ways to easily integrate data,” Martin said.

And beyond that, MuleSoft and UCSF are working on building application programming interfaces (APIs) for getting data into and out of back-end systems. There, too, the reliable connection of data and applications is critical.

“They’re really mixing the old the new and frankly the bizarre,” said Ross Mason, MuleSoft’s founder and vice president of product strategy. “They’ve got this archaic sort of pager system that has a funky sort of protocol that we need to connect to. [MuleSoft] does allow us to mix all these things together.”