Mobile Medication Administration

The Mobile Medication Administration (MMA) defines the integration between healthcare systems and mobile (or any other) clients using RESTful web services. This allows connecting EHRs with smartphones, smart pill boxes, and other personal or professional devices.

Summary

This is a first of a series of IHE profiles that will provide a seamless integration mechanism covering across the entire Medication workflows, without the limitations of messaging (e.g. stricter point-to-point connections) and using RESTful services to support classical and new platforms.

The MMA profile provides 2 mechanisms for applications dealing with mobile administration:

• Populating the mobile device with a list of scheduled medications from the EHR
• Sending the report of administrations to the EHR or any other system.

The MMA profile provides functional guidance on how to use different resources for different scenarios, to ensure consistent interoperability. This profile is based on FHIR STU3, preadopting some changes that will appear in STU4.

Benefits

The MMA profile supports interaction between mobile devices and traditional systems, but is also suitable for interoperability between classical systems, e.g. in a hospital setting.

MMA supports simple cases:

• A patient application on a smartphone that simply receives the scheduled administrations from the pharmacy system or hospital system, and reminds the patient (without registering the report)
• A patient application on a smartphone that does not receive any schedule but by scanning a barcode, can build up a patient's medication list by providing the administration entries
• A patient application to monitor medication regime compliance.

Or more advanced integration cases:

• An application for a home care nurse, that receives the requests and informs the nurse about the medications that each patient is scheduled to take in a given period.
• An application (or the same as above) for a nurse, where the nurse can register the planned (as above) or unplanned administration of medication
• An application for patients to receive updated medication instructions on their mobile device and / or register the use of medication, e.g. by scanning the barcodes (The scanning of barcodes and retrieving the medication information itself will be described in another IHE Pharmacy technical supplement).

Besides mobile applications, more conventional uses are also supported:

• Recording the administration of drugs in a hospital setting
• Recording the administration of drugs by an infusion device (pump)

This supplement is intended to be fully compliant with the HL7 FHIR specification, providing only use-case driven constraints and guidance for implementers. Currently the HL7 FHIR standard is in “Standard for Test Use” (STU) and may experience a large amount of change during this phase. Readers are advised that, while the profiled components in this supplement may not accurately reflect the most recent version of the FHIR standard, implementations of PDQm will be tested as specified in this supplement. Changes to the FHIR DSTU will be integrated into this supplement via the formal IHE Change Proposal (CP) process.

Details

The actors directly involved in the Mobile Medication Administration profile and the relevant transactions between them. These actors are represented separately because both transactions are optional. A given device may require the transaction for retrieving the scheduled medication administrations, in which case it implements the actors on the left; Another (or the same) device may implement the transaction for submitting administration reports, in which case it implements the actors on the right;

Systems Affected

All systems that want to use a lightweight RESTful approach to sending information about scheduled medication and/or informing about effective medication administration.

Specification

Profile Status: Trial Implementation

Documents:

Additional Supplements: Appendix Z on HL7 FHIR

Underlying Standards:

• HL7 FHIR STU3 http://hl7.org/fhir/STU3
  • Patient
  • Medication
  • MedicationRequest
  • MedicationAdministration

FHIR Implementation Guide

Informatively this profile is also published on Simplifier as an Implementation Guide at [1]

The conformance resources are also available on the Implementation Material folder.

See Also

This page is based on the Profile Overview Template