Appointment scheduling, imaging apps, or even a competing medical billing service will tap cloud service.

Drchrono, the electronic health records cloud service best known for its iPad app, is making its application programming interface freely available, and is likewise introducing a medical “apps store.”

To call it an app store is slightly grandiose — it’s really only a listing of compatible apps and cloud services, with accompanying screenshots — but Drchrono says it should vet the apps in keeping with the standard in their technology and their fit with its own services. Philosophically, in any case, the approach mirrors that of the app store for the iPhone and iPad, said Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder of Drchrono. “i believe what Apple did is brilliant. They said anyone can build apps for the iPhone, but we are going to review them.”

Developers must fill out an API access request form, but “the API itself, we’ll give to everybody,” Kivatinos said. “It’s more the access to push and pull data from doctor’s accounts that we’re careful about.” Developers who explore the probabilities of the API should be given access to a sandbox environment where they’re able to work with simulated patient records.

The first compatible apps Drchrono is promoting are:

• MedXT, a medical imaging app from a fellow Y Combinator company.
• Nephosity, another medical imaging app.
• BetterDoctor, a doctor directory and appointment scheduling system.

The level of integration and the info accessible to every app varies, Kivatinos said. For BetterDoctor, it’s mostly a question of single sign-on, where users can register and check in with their Drchrono account information and BetterDoctor can act as an appointment scheduling front end to Drchrono. MedXT can publish a PDF rendering of a medical image into an individual’s patient record in Drchrono, while also allowing doctors to take advantage of their Drchrono credentials to log into its own app for a high-res version. There are already plans for a version 2 of that integration where Drchrono users will be capable of use a more-sophisticated embedded viewer to access the photographs.

“Through the years, it’ll get increasingly more interesting as we decide easy methods to get more integrations working within Drchrono,” he said.

If Drchrono is to determine an active developer community, it still has some work to do. A Google group established for discussions of the API was manage years ago, and is to date populated mostly by developers lamenting the inability of activity there. Kivatinos said he and his cofounders was occupied with APIs because the earliest days of the corporate, but for a very long time that interest was premature because they did not have enough users or an outsized enough business to draw a strong developer community. “So we thought, ‘What are the opposite things which are really starting off today?’ and we saw the iPad. So we used the API to construct the iPad app, the iPhone app, and the Android app.”

Drchrono recently announced a partnership with Box for file sharing, but if that’s the case the mixing was built round the Box APIs. “That’s variety of the wrong way around,” Kivatinos said, where Drchrono has gotten large enough to draw other healthcare app vendors that like to reach its customers or gain access to a couple of its functionality.

In some cases, there may be overlap. Drchrono includes its own appointment scheduling, as an instance, but realizes it can’t necessarily be the right at everything, and for BetterDoctor, “that’s their whole business,” Kivatinos said. “We perform a little things very well, particularly mobile EHR and billing.”

Drchrono was also approached recently by another company that’s doing medical EHR and billing but was concerned that it might lose customers in 2014 for loss of an EHR certified to satisfy the federal government’s Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements, Kivatinos said. There, the combination should be to show just the EHR components of Drchrono during the API that allows you to be exposed during the other company’s app — while that firm would continue to apply its own billing software, in place of the Drchrono version. “They’ll do it so there isn’t a change to the doctor’s workflow, and also you would not have to dual enter anything,” he said.

Kivatinos said he did not want to call the firm without permission, but mentioned it for example of the way he plans to work “in spite of firms that may seem like competitors.”

David F. Carr is editor of data Healthcare and a contributor on social business, in addition the writer of Social Collaboration For Dummies. Follow him on Twitter@davidfcarr or Google+.

Healthcare providers must look beyond Meaningful Use regulations and begin asking: Is my site as useful as Amazon? Also inside the Patient Engagement issue of InformationWeek Healthcare: IT executives ought to stay well informed in regards to the strengths and limitations of comparative effectiveness research. (Free registration required.)

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