Supporting Clinical Care: SOFA on FHIR

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Clinical Decision Support Systems
• Medical Software Development

Background:

• Interoperability in healthcare is crucial for improving patient care and clinical workflows.
• Automating risk score calculations, such as the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), can enhance efficiency.
• Existing systems may lack seamless data integration for real-time risk assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate how healthcare interoperability can enhance patient care through automated risk scoring.
• To develop and display an automated Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) risk score on a medical dashboard.
• To leverage Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) for data exchange and microservices for system architecture.

Main Methods:

• Developed a prototype microservice adhering to prioritized stakeholder requirements.
• Utilized Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) for data extraction from a FHIR server.
• Employed PretoFaces for user interface design feedback and iterative development.

Main Results:

• The interoperable prototype successfully met all highest-priority requirements.
• The microservice effectively collected, extracted, and computed SOFA scores and subscores.
• A significant majority of second and third-highest priority requirements were also fulfilled.

Conclusions:

• An automatically computed SOFA score can be rapidly developed using FHIR-based microservices.
• This approach demonstrates the potential of interoperability to streamline clinical decision support.
• The developed prototype serves as a model for integrating automated risk scoring into medical dashboards.