Introduction to Zus

The basic unit of the Zus platform is the Zus Aggregated Profile, or ZAP. The ZAP is an up-to-date, comprehensive record of a given patient’s health history, assembled and curated by Zus from various external data networks. The ZAP is designed to help care teams quickly get up-to-speed on the health history of new patients, as well as stay-in-the-know as new events occur. It can also be accessed directly for population health analysts and developers to generate insights and optimize care.

Types of patient data

Zus assembles the ZAP from the following types of patient data:

  • Medical - EHR data from thousands of provider sites nationwide, accessed via interoperability network partners such as CommonWell and Carequality
  • Pharmacy - Prescription and medication fill data from pharmacies nationwide, accessed via our e-prescribing network partner Surescripts
  • ADT - Alerts about admissions, discharges, and transfers from healthcare facilities nationwide, accessed via our ADT network partners PointClickCare and Bamboo Health
  • Labs - Comprehensive historical lab results from clinical laboratories nationwide, accessed via our lab partner Quest Diagnostics

Zus is constantly integrating with new data partners and incorporating that information into the ZAP, to ensure care teams have access to the most complete patient record possible.

Making patient data easier to work with

In addition to aggregating patient data to populate the ZAP, Zus also does the hard work of making that data usable at the point of care, including:

  • FHIR normalization - Ensures all information is accessible via the dominant healthcare data standard
  • Terminology enrichment- Helps care teams interpret patient data by applying consistent terminology sets
  • Intelligent summarization - Enables care teams to focus on what matters most, rather than reading through dozens of duplicate documents
  • Front-end visualization - Allows care teams to quickly drill in on the data that matters most, using UI’s designed first and foremost with clinicians in mind

While cleaning and synthesizing patient data is critical, Zus also ensures customers have access to all the raw underlying data, as well as detailed provenance tracing data back to its source.

Sharing data across organizations

While the ZAP is valuable as a comprehensive view of a given patient’s health history, most providers serve thousands of patients, who in turn often receive care from multiple organizations, all using their own Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

The Zus Grid is the collection of all ZAPs across all provider organizations, designed to facilitate real-time data sharing and care collaboration. Whenever a patient receives care from more than one provider (for example, by seeing both a PCP and a specialist), multiple provider organizations can read from and contribute to that patient’s ZAP simultaneously. In these instances, the ZAP serves as the “common record” across which these organizations collaborate.

Integrating the ZAP into care workflows

To meet customers where they are, Zus offers four different integration paths, summarized below:

The integration path best suited for your organization will likely depend on your build buy/philosophy, as well as your existing tech stack. The simplified decision tree below illustrates how your choice of EHR may influence your preferred integration path.

If you are unsure of your preferred integration path, or whether your EHR has a native Zus integration, the Zus Solution Design team is more than happy to help.