EMR Direct

EMR Direct provides Direct secure messaging as a health information service provider, alongside HL7 FHIR and OAuth APIs and digital certificate services, serving healthcare organisations and the software vendors that connect them.

Offering both Direct messaging and FHIR APIs covers the two distinct ways healthcare systems exchange information, which are frequently confused. Direct is push based, sending a document to a known recipient much as email does. FHIR is pull based, letting a system query another for specific data. A referral letter is a Direct message, whereas retrieving a patient's medication list is a FHIR request, and an organisation needs both.

Certificate services underpin both. Whether an entity is sending a Direct message or authorising a FHIR API call, the counterparty must verify who it is dealing with, and issuing and validating those credentials is the trust infrastructure the exchange rests on.

Serving software vendors as well as providers matters commercially. An electronic health record vendor embedding Direct and FHIR capability serves every practice using its product, so reaching the vendor reaches the market far more efficiently than selling to practices one at a time, and the capability arrives already integrated rather than as another login.