If you're building with SMART on FHIR, Canvas has good news for you. We’ve expanded our capabilities for supporting SMART on FHIR apps and built a helpful guide on how to embed SMART apps to customize and extend your Canvas EMR.
If you're new to SMART on FHIR, it's a set of open standards that enables third-party applications to securely access electronic health record data through standardized APIs, combining the SMART authorization framework with FHIR data standards to allow healthcare apps to launch from within EMR systems and retrieve patient data with proper authentication and consent controls.
For developers, using SMART on FHIR to integrate customized apps directly into Canvas EMR just became incredibly simple. Our new guide shows you how to use our SDK to seamlessly embed existing solutions—or create new ones—that enhance clinical workflows like scheduling, charting, and billing. Even if you’ve used SMART on FHIR with other EMRs, you’ll notice the difference in how quickly you can go from prototype to production with Canvas, no convoluted setup or third-party proxies required.
Why We’re Investing in SMART on FHIR
At Canvas, we’re on a mission to give care teams superpowers through software. The SMART on FHIR standard represents exactly the kind of open, transparent approach to innovation that Canvas champions. As a first principle we believe that standardized APIs and integration frameworks benefit care teams, giving them control over workflows without sacrificing the user experience. This can help clinicians access specialized tools (e.g. population health management, clinical decision support, or care coordination) to drive better patient outcomes, at lower cost, through improved access and stronger care team collaboration. That’s why we’re investing in SMART on FHIR but also why we’ve gone even further.
For our developer community, which has already built hundreds of plugins across production instances, SMART on FHIR support means they can programmatically integrate existing SMART on FHIR healthcare applications within Canvas, while maintaining flexibility to integrate that same application elsewhere that the SMART on FHIR standard is supported. Within Canvas, we can provide these applications with deeper patient context and add more valuable use cases for the Canvas SDK.
Leverage the Canvas FHIR API for Robust Integration Capabilities
With Canvas, both SMART on FHIR and our SDK provide access to the Canvas Medical FHIR API, featuring 37 resources and more writable FHIR endpoints than most other EMRs. This foundation empowers practices and partners with secure, comprehensive access to EHR data. Most EMRs offer only limited, read-only FHIR endpoints. Canvas is different, enabling bidirectional data flow and full participation in real-time clinical workflows. Our SDK is designed to make this integration surprisingly straightforward, and you can build your own application or choose from a gallery of powerful, standardized SMART on FHIR applications without extensive re-development.
Customize Your EMR with Our Growing Ecosystem of Extensions
Beyond seamless integration with existing SMART on FHIR apps, Canvas also offers our own plug-and-play extension library, where we are continually growing with user-tested third-party integrations, AI innovations, and practical health solutions. This library of pre-built Extensions provides you with reference examples to build with, or to simply add to your Canvas EMR and get started quickly. Utilize our canvas-sdk example plug-ins and guides as your starting point to build tailored solutions and join our developer community to collaborate with others and connect with the Canvas engineering team who is there to support you. No need to stop at passive app embedding, go further and extend the EMR itself through custom logic, automated tasking, and rich domain-level triggers.
Get Started and Fork It! (The Code, That Is)
To help you hit the ground running, we’ve included a link to an example SMART app on GitHub. So go ahead, fork it, publish it, play around, and customize it to meet the needs of your startup or care model. It's a great way to learn by doing!
