The Calculated Journey of Louis Leff and EBMcalc Continues

Today’s healthcare technology is all about interoperability, linking disparate systems such as Cerner, Epic, Allscripts and Athena health records.

We built EBMcalc as a different kind of interoperability solution. Created in the 1990’s, EBMcalc comprises a wide array of clinical decision support tools, which include hundreds of medical equations, clinical criteria sets, data converters and decision trees.

EBMcalc was built as an app to run in early web browsers. Those browsers worked the same on Macs, PC’s, Commodores and Unix workstations, as well as  Palm, PocketPC, BlackBerry and other handheld devices. This marvelous interoperability led to the wide adoption of EBMcalc around the globe.

By 2019, it was clear that EBMcalc had to interoperate with electronic health records, and the EBMcalc FHIR App was born. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is the perfect standard to link EBMcalc calculators with individual patient data. In 2020, a new version of EBMcalc was created, using SMART on FHIR standards to automatically transfer data into our calculators. The EBMcalc FHIR App then completed the Cerner code Developer Program validation process, verifying four key categories: security, functionality, technical conformance and operations. The validated app is now available through the Cerner app gallery through a separate licensing agreement and can be embedded within the Cerner Millennium® Electronic Health Record workflows.

Then COVID-19 hit. EBMcalc engineers geared up to add FHIR version four functionality with the ability to write discrete data like COVID prognosis scores directly into EHR databases. Through 2020 to 2021, we added more than thirty new calculators related to COVID. We have tracked literature from around the world and now have mortality and criticality predictors from the U.S, the U.K., Canada, Spain, China, the Netherlands, Kuwait, Turkey, Iran, Brazil and other countries studying the pandemic.

And like all recent COVID literature, our COVID calculators are made freely available on the Internet. All are welcome to access COVID calculators at  https://EBMcalc.com.

The EBMcalc FHIR App continues to evolve and improve. On the horizon is the integration of machine learning and natural language processing to collate the rapidly growing literature base that is the core of EBMcalc. Stay tuned and subscribe to EBSCO Health Notes to read as the journey continues!