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Enhancing the clinical utility of CDAs with the Orchestrate APIs within Snowflake

Amidst the explosion of healthcare data from various sources and file formats, seamless clinical data integration requires terminology normalization, file format conversion, and document consolidation to make data contained in CDAs and other common formats compatible with internal systems post-ingestion. CareEvolution’s Orchestrate APIs transform how healthcare developers and IT teams can integrate and use clinical data, enhancing its utility.

The cloud-native Orchestrate APIs are available in the Snowflake marketplace for Snowflake users to execute queries against the Orchestrate APIs directly from within their own Snowflake database. Snowflake users can now convert and clean clinical data files, and move multiple CDAs into a clean, consolidated FHIR bundle for each patient, directly from within Snowflake.

Reasons to use the Orchestrate APIs from within Snowflake include:

  • Data Stays Securely in Your Snowflake Account: No need to move your data externally for transformation—it remains securely stored within your Snowflake environment.
  • Seamless Handling of Unstructured Data: Snowflake’s robust support for unstructured data, using its variant type, makes it easy to navigate and manage FHIR payloads returned by the Orchestrate native app.
  • Effortless Setup: Installation is simple, requiring just a few clicks and an API key. No additional coding is needed—just write SQL to start converting and enriching your patient datasets.

Orchestrate offers 3 critical steps for Snowflake users to integrate healthcare data successfully:

1. Terminology Standardization:
Orchestrate transforms unstandardized healthcare terminology into recognized standard code systems. Conditions, problems, or diagnoses can be mapped to reference codings from systems like ICD-10-CM, ICD-9-CM-Diagnosis, and SNOMED. For instance, using the API, a term like “dm2” can be standardized:

python: Copy code

orchestrate.terminology.standardize_condition(null, null, 'dm2')

This returns: json

{
  "coding": [
    {"system": "http://snomed.info/sct", "code": "44054006", "display": "Diabetes mellitus type 2 (disorder)"},
    {"system": "http://hl7.org/fhir/sid/icd-10-cm", "code": "E11.9", "display": "Type 2 diabetes mellitus without complications"}
  ]
}

In this instance, the unstructured term “dm2” was translated to the corresponding SNOMED and ICD-10 codes. The specific reference code system used depends on the domain (e.g., medication codes may use codings from RxNorm and NDC; report types may use LOINC and SNOMED). Once coded, concepts are mapped across multiple terminology standards (e.g., ICD-10 to SNOMED, NDC to RxNORM).

Standardize directly on tabular data from within Snowflake:

This standardization ensures that diagnoses and other unstructured and uncoded text in EHR records are not “missed” and that no data is left behind. For more information on terminology standardization visit our API documentation.

2. File Format Conversion:
Orchestrate facilitates the conversion of file formats such as CDA and HL7 V2 messages into FHIR R4 bundles, ensuring that data is in the most useful format for modern healthcare applications. For instructions on converting to FHIR see our Convert API developer documentation.

Watch how multiple CDAs get standardized and converted to FHIR bundles with a simple API call within Snowflake:

3. Document Deduplication:
Orchestrate’s Convert API allows for FHIR R4 outputs from multiple conversion operations to be provided as input into a “combine” operation to get to a single consolidated FHIR R4 bundle. This eliminates duplicate clinical records and creates a single person record, allowing for simplified reviews of a patient’s health history.

Who can benefit from the Orchestrate APIs?

Snowflake users can adopt CareEvolution’s Orchestrate to build more organized and complete clinical data sets, enabling end users throughout the healthcare ecosystem to make more informed decisions more efficiently. This capability is crucial for risk and quality management at payors, medical records reviews at life insurance companies, and population health management or care management at health systems. Cleansed, standardized, and interoperable clinical datasets enable better patient care and health management.

Conclusion

Snowflake users can access the Orchestrate APIs within the Snowflake marketplace and more details can be found in the Orchestrate API documentation. Orchestrate does not publish any data. It serves as a native interface to the Orchestrate API.