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Our Journey
Flexpa was started as Automate Medical and announced publicly in March, 2020. From the start, we believed that most of the upside in healthcare is still in the future. We focussed on an isolated problem to start: the time and cost of interpreting the (very common) pulmonary function test.
We traced the recent development of PFT testing standards by the American Thoracic Society and we built two product prototypes:
- PFT Tutorbot was built from the ground up as a "modernization demo" of clinician reporting expectations for pulmonary function tests.
- PFT Extractor was built to solve the data interoperability challenge associated with automatically processing PFTs: the tests are PDFs! PFT Extractor can accept an input PDF and output structured JSON + LOINC coded PFT data.
Our work on these early product prototypes culminated in our publication of a FHIR Implementation Guide for Pulmonary Function Tests. This publication also led us to refocus on developing better dev tooling for the FHIR community and away from a specific focus on PFTs.
We became increasingly involved in the healthcare standards development community - attending HL7 Connectathons and testing original implementations. By August of year one, we released Sero: a set of modern JavaScript Modules for FHIR. Flexpa as a product vision began to crystallize soon after.
Last modified 3mo ago