General FAQs
What are the costs involved in using EHR.Network APIs?
EHR.Network is a usage based subscription service. It has a low entry level and can scale up and grow with you as your business grows. So you will have a low fixed costs to start with and subscription costs will always be aligned to your scale of business.
The factors that influence the subscription costs are
- Services used on the platform
- Count of APIs consumed
- Amount of data transfer
- Amount of data storage
As a ballpark figure your fixed costs will be around ₹15K/Month during development and ₹25K/month when live. For more guidance, please visit the platform pricing page.
Where will the platform & data be hosted?
Our services are cloud agnostic and can be hosted on any infrastructure. The cloud hosted service is currently on the Bangalore data center of Digitalocean.
Can we connect data from a different service with the EHR platform?
The platform architecture is federated with multiple services and databases. We also have an appServer framework to extend the platform with app specific functionality. You can have your own database, workflows and business logic at your appServer level.
The appServer can also be used to integrate data from other external services in your application.
How do we add APIs for our app specific content?
Our appServer framework is designed for this purpose. We have a free java based framework with a large number of ready APIs. This can be extended with additional functionality and APIs for your specific requirements.
Pls have a look at this API docs to see some of the currently implemented APIs in our appServer framework.
What portion of the platform would we own & control?
Our service is generally available as a managed service. We offer multiple managed service deployment options, each with varying levels of control for you
- Shared public cloud – Shared infrastructure. Standard APIs. Extensions(scheme, queries etc) are managed by us. Lowest entry cost + usage based costs
- Managed dedicated cloud – Dedicated infra on our cloud, extended API set, full admin API access, optional data backup to your cloud instance. Low entry cost + usage based costs
- Managed private cloud – Managed service on your cloud infrastructure, extended API set, full admin API and server access, Higher base cost + usage based costs
- Private cloud – Run and manage on your cloud infrastructure, extended API set, full admin API and server access, Highest base cost for platform licensing + ongoing support cost
Can you help us customize the platform for our needs?
The platform offers customization at 2 levels
- Level1 – Configurations and updates including new clinical models, queries, master setups such as Roles & professions etc.
- Level2 – Development of custom app specific logic and workflows
Platform APIs allow almost everything in level1. However some of them such as clinical modelling may require specific domain skills. Everything in level2 is custom development specific to your application.
We offer professional services for both of the above. For all level2 customizations, we extend the platform for your requirements using our Java based appServer framework.
We do not provide app development services at this point.
Do we need to hire a part time/ full time developer?
We can offer services to take care of your requirements up to the appServer APIs. You can make use of these services as required. You do not have to hire full time developers from us.
However you will have to make alternate arrangements for the development of your application(s).
In case we discontinue working with EHR.Network, how do we transition?
At a base level all the critical data(Demographics & EHR) on the platform are standards compliant and you should be able to migrate them to any other platform that follows the same open standards. At all times the clinical data generated by your solution will be compliant to openEHR datasets.
That said, if we decide to part ways, we could work on an agreement towards a perpetual license to the appropriate version of services being used for your business continuity.
In case you plan to migrate to an alternate platform, you can extract data from our platform and load them to your new platform using FHIR and openEHR APIs. The templates (that indicate the schema) and the associated settings are open and available to you at all times.
Is a global EHR ID created in your system (as per openEHR)?
Our ehrids follow the UUID format and so can be reasonably assumed to be global. However to have true universal ehrid for a person, we need to have a framework for issuing such IDs that is centrally governed and accepted by all EHR vendors globally. Such a framework does not exist now.
In India, this framework is being implemented under the proposed National Digital Health Mission(NDHM). HealthIDs will be created by NDHM for all Indian citizens and all EHR vendors are expected to use this to uniquely identify persons across the country. EHR.Network platform supports NDHM HealthIDs in addition to the personUuid and multiple other IDs.
EHR.Network website says data backup every 8 hrs and recovery 4hrs. How about application availability and probability of data loss in between backup cycles?
The recovery point objective(RPO) and recovery time objective(RTO) mentioned in our website are for our cloud hosted shared platform. It assumes certain criticality requirements for the applications hosted on it to arrive at the current price point. Any further improvements to the RPO/RTO will have a corresponding impact on the subscription costs.
While we continue to work on improving the availability and RPO/RTO, we are also trying to keep the subscription costs at levels that are reasonable and acceptable to the market.
In case your applications have more stringent requirements, you can consider the other available deployment options where we can help you implement your custom requirements on top of the standard platform. For example, since we use PostgreSQL as the database, we can implement a WAL backup option to minimize data loss and a DRP plan for service continuity.