Overview

The Bluebird Single Digital Patient Record (SDPR) was designed to facilitate interoperability and secure sharing of Personal Health Information. It provides a current summary of that patients core health information. Bluebird does this by aggregating core e-health information from multiple trusted sources such as doctors, hospitals, labs, radiologists and creating a summary of that patient's most up to date clinical data. Bluebird is a cloud solution (currently Amazon Web Services, but Azure is an option). The Bluebird SDPR is an intelligent data repository powered by internationally endorsed open data standards (including the FHIR open API standard for health records).

During the recent COVID-19 emergency in South Africa, Bluebird provided a COVID-19 specific SDPR to the National Department of Health for six months while their IT systems were being upgraded. This confirmed the scaleability and robustness of the Bluebird SDPR on a national level.

By facilitating data flow across the health system Bluebird empowers better clinical outcomes and data-driven decision-making.

Medical Summary

The Bluebird Medical Summary is a core data set of the most relevant clinical information. It is designed to give clinicians core clinical information essential to safely care for that patient. The Bluebird medical summary incorporates all the elements of both the International Patient Summary (IPS) - see http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/2019Sep/ as well as the US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI). The Bluebird Medical Summary is not intended to reproduce the entire content of an Electronic Health Record (EHR), but rather to provide a foundation for safe continuity of care. This core personal health information includes immunisations, medications, allergies and adverse reactions. Bluebird publishes these specifications in a user-friendly, technology-neutral format.

APIs

Bluebird's Internet-facing application programming interfaces (APIs) are trusted access points to the Bluebird SDPR and allow:

1. Data to be securely sent into the SDHR
2. Data to be securely retrieved from the SDHR

These APIs empower clinicians with the most up to date critical information to safety see unfamiliar patients. The robustness and scaleability of these Bluebird APIs were battle tested on a national basis during the first six months of the COVID-19 crisis in Southern Africa.

Protection of Personal Health Information (PHI)

Bluebird has defined mechanisms for health applications to connect to the Bluebird SDPR with appropriate security guarantees.
Documented components include authorization, authentication, and UI integration. OAuth2, for example, is an open standard for granting websites/apps secure access to information. The way Bluebird protects electronic patient information is published here: intelms.com/1i and here: intelms.com/211

Open Standards

Bluebird supports open standards in health. An open API participation agreement documents the rules of engagement for the subscribers to each API. At a technical level Bluebird endorses the FHIR^® standard for exchanging health data via RESTful APIs and uses the FAIR data principles (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) and a common data model based on OHDSI (https://www.ohdsi.org/data-standardization/the-common-data-model/).

Future Plans

For some time our R&D department has been working hard to bring the following to fruition:

• Provide doctors and patients secure digital channels to communicate with one another.
• Provide a patient portal to view clinical information and control access to that information.
• Safely and securely integrate consumer health apps and wearables with Bluebird.
• Allow patients to download their health records to authorized devices including an iPhone. Empower Apple devices to create an enduring connection to Bluebird. The Health app will periodically connect to Bluebird and pull in any new health records and notify the user when new records are available.
• Provide a Referral interface for doctors.
• Provide an Appointment booking interface.
• Provide Integrated Telemedicine.
• Provide Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools to help clinicians and patients interpret data and make informed choices.

Watch this space!