FHIR Could Change How Health Data Is Transferred
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
The future of EHR (electronic health records) and interoperability could be changing, all thanks to a new set of standards that takes a different approach to how health data is transferred.
FHIR
Developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7), Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a proposed interoperability standard that has drawn interest across the health IT world in the form of exploration, experiments, and testing.
The set of standards stands out from the currently used C-CDA (Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture) in its simplicity — it takes a modern web services approach that is used by companies including Yahoo, Facebook, and Google. The end result is easier exchanges of highly specific, well-defined pieces of information between systems.
Under C-CDA, entire documents had to be exchanged. For your clients, that means that if a physician needed just one piece of information about a patient, multiple documents from an EHR would no longer be needed to fulfill a request.
The Big Difference
FHIR embodies a relatively simple shift in approach to healthcare data, moving away from a document-centric outlook, to a “data-level access approach” that uses APIs (application program interfaces). Government Health IT cites a specific example: “… a resource could be defined as a medication list, a problem list, or lab results. Already in today’s system, standard coding sets such as Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) for lab results, or RxNorm for medications, allow software applications to exchange just the data that is needed and present it in a highly meaningful way to clinicians or consumers. What FHIR offers is tools for developers to assemble and present many much smaller data elements to enhance the context or meaning of the information.”
The benefits of this approach even extend to the patient level. It will allow developers to access and use PHI in the creation of new apps that are even more patient-centered than what we currently see. It would also give developers a plug-and-play platform that would be similar to the Apple app store, and cut back on the need that many software vendors currently have of creating their own APIs.
Moving The Market Forward
The “elegant” nature of FHIR extends well beyond use for EHR vendors and into the world of interoperability for HIEs.
FHIR directly addresses business needs in the interoperability sphere by striving to provide more seamless connectivity standards, while simultaneously keeping common scenarios simple.
As far as federal backing is concerned, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) JASON Task Force has already recommended that ONC establish and maintain public API standards — a need in the push for increased interoperability that FHIR would definitely fill.