FHIR: The Future of Healthcare Interoperability
through APIs, paving the path to a connected care ecosystem
What is HL7 FHIR and why is it important?
HL7 FHIR is a standard developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7) for exchanging healthcare information electronically. It's designed to facilitate interoperability by sharing discrete, granular health data using application programming interfaces (APIs).
HL7 standards, including FHIR, enable data senders and receivers to understand health records in the same way. This supports seamless communication between different healthcare organisations and application systems, ensuring that healthcare providers have timely and accurate access to health data crucial for patient care and operational efficiency.
FHIR leverages modern web technologies and adopts a simple, flexible approach to making just enough data available where and when needed. Previous HL7 standards shared documents or entire patient records, making them difficult for application developers to learn and use easily.
FHIR's modular structure supports efficient sharing and management of various types of healthcare data for both care and application development.
How does FHIR improve patient care in healthcare settings?
Unlike previous standards, FHIR lets you easily build innovative applications that efficiently gather, aggregate, and analyse diverse healthcare and administrative data from disparate sources.
FHIR can help you break down interoperability barriers and transform raw health and care data into meaningful and actionable information. It can help you improve the quality, efficiency, and safety of just about any healthcare service, process, or product by enabling faster and easier access to data from different sources.
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How does FHIR improve patient care in healthcare settings?
Unlike previous standards, FHIR lets you easily build innovative applications that efficiently gather, aggregate, and analyse diverse healthcare and administrative data from disparate sources.
FHIR can help you break down interoperability barriers and transform raw health and care data into meaningful and actionable information. It can help you improve the quality, efficiency, and safety of just about any healthcare service, process, or product by enabling faster and easier access to data from different sources.
The Key Components of FHIR
These Resources are defined in a way that they can be reused in various clinical contexts, ensuring consistency across different systems.
This approach facilitates the seamless integration of FHIR with existing systems and allows developers to create and deploy interoperable solutions quickly.
A bundle can be used to package a set of resources for a specific purpose, such as submitting multiple resources as a single transaction, or returning a set of search results.
This flexibility of the core standard ensures that FHIR can adapt to meet specific requirements of an almost infinite number of use cases to create interoperability.
This tailored approach ensures that FHIR can support broad and varied applications, from simple data sharing between healthcare providers to complex clinical decision support systems.
These components work together to provide a comprehensive, adaptable, and robust framework for healthcare data interoperability. By leveraging these elements, FHIR facilitates real-time access to data, supports enhanced clinical decision-making, and ultimately improves patient outcomes.
Key FHIR Capabilities
The Meaning of Interoperability Has Changed
FHIR Solutions in Real-World Healthcare
This rapid data retrieval can be lifesaving, ensuring that emergency personnel have all the information they need to make informed decisions quickly.
For example, apps that generate personalised dietary plans for patients with specific nutritional needs can pull relevant data from their health records via FHIR APIs. These apps enhance patient engagement and adherence to treatment plans by providing customised, actionable guidance.
For example, FHIR-enabled systems can integrate data from wearables and home monitoring devices with electronic health records (EHRs), allowing care managers to track patient progress in real-time and adjust treatments as needed.
This integration supports proactive management of conditions like diabetes and heart disease, reducing hospital admissions and improving quality of life.
FHIR APIs for electronic prior authorisation developed collaboratively by payers, providers and vendors, can automate nearly the entire process, reducing burden on providers, delays in care, and freeing up payer staff for care management.
FHIR makes it easier to break down the barriers between different systems and deliver just the information needed, to whomever needs it, in near-real-time.
By using FHIR standards, primary care doctors can easily share the relevant information from patient records, including medical history and diagnostic information, with specialists.
This ensures that the specialist has all the necessary information before the patient’s visit, reducing delays in treatment and improving the overall efficiency of care coordination.
For example, the FDA used InterSystems IRIS and the FHIR system to collect data on adverse vaccine reactions.
Challenges to Implementing FHIR in Healthcare Organisations
Interoperability Complexity
The complexity of integrating FHIR with diverse healthcare systems is a significant challenge. Many hospitals and healthcare providers rely on older, mission-critical applications that continue to operate effectively, making it unrealistic and unnecessary to replace these systems entirely.
Interoperability can be more easily achieved with advanced integration tools and robust security functions that simplify the connection between FHIR and various systems.
InterSystems excels in this area by providing a robust set of solutions that enable systems to connect to FHIR without having to upgrade or replace their current technology.
Training and Skill Requirements
Healthcare staff often require training to utilise FHIR effectively. Staff need to be supported with educational resources, online learning tools and customer support, aiding their understanding and ability to use FHIR-based systems efficiently.
InterSystems provides an array of training and ongoing support opportunities, including videos and documentation, learning paths, and in-person and online classroom learning.
Resource Constraints
Smaller organisations may struggle with the financial resources needed for FHIR implementation. Scalable, cost-effective solutions that help organisations of all sizes adopt FHIR without significant financial strain are critical.
InterSystems meets the needs of these organisations in multiple ways, which includes providing managed services that remove the burden of purchasing, operating, securing and maintaining costly infrastructure.
Additionally, solutions like InterSystems FHIR Transformation Service utilise a message-based pricing model with no long-term contracts to ensure organisations only pay for what they use.
Consistency and Quality of Data
Maintaining high-quality and consistent data in FHIR exchanges is essential. But having high-quality data isn't enough; it also needs to be usable.
InterSystems provides advanced data management capabilities to convert data to FHIR while keeping it accurate and organised.
Legacy Systems and Data Standards
A core challenge in FHIR implementation is the prevalence of data still represented in older standards. The ability of healthcare organisations to leverage FHIR's benefits without discarding existing systems is essential.
InterSystems allows organisations to do just that by providing the tools needed to move data from older systems out as FHIR, supporting a gradual transition and integration that respects the historical investments in IT infrastructure.
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As a leader in healthcare data technology and standards-based interoperability, we’re committed to tackling your challenges through FHIR-based solutions, including:
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Explore and Develop with FHIR
FAQs about HL7 FHIR
- Data Access Controls: FHIR specifies strict access controls, ensuring that only authorised individuals can access sensitive health data.
- Encryption: Data transmitted using FHIR is typically encrypted, both in transit and at rest, providing a high level of security against unauthorised access.
- Audit Trails: FHIR supports extensive audit trails, recording who accessed what data and when, which is crucial for monitoring and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
- Compliance with Standards: FHIR is designed to be compliant with major healthcare privacy standards, such as HIPAA in the United States, ensuring adherence to legal requirements for data privacy.
- User Authentication and Authorisation: FHIR includes mechanisms for robust user authentication and authorisation, further securing access to health data.
It uses a modular structure with "resources" as fundamental units, making it simpler and more efficient for developers to work with. FHIR supports RESTful architectures, JSON, and XML for data representation, aligning with current web development trends.
This contrasts with older standards that often relied on complex and rigid structures, making FHIR more adaptable and user-friendly in today's digital healthcare environment.
It supports real-time data sharing, which is vital for organisations that need up-to-date patient information on mobile devices.
FHIR's use of modern RESTful web services makes it straightforward for developers to integrate healthcare data into diverse applications, leading to innovative solutions for telehealth, remote monitoring, and patient engagement. This results in improved healthcare delivery, personalised patient care, and better health outcomes.
They act as intermediaries, allowing software programs to exchange data using FHIR standards. This integration is essential for modern healthcare applications, where timely access to accurate health data is necessary for effective care delivery.
APIs make it possible to incorporate a wide range of functionalities into healthcare applications, from accessing patient records to updating treatment plans, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services.
By providing a standard method for exchanging healthcare data, FHIR bridges the gap between new and existing technologies in healthcare IT, enabling legacy systems to communicate with more modern applications and platforms.
This capability is crucial for the gradual and seamless transition of healthcare organisations towards more advanced data management practices.
Additionally, international health organisations and IT developers are creating FHIR-based solutions to address specific healthcare needs and challenges. This global adoption highlights FHIR's versatility and effectiveness in enhancing healthcare data interoperability.
As healthcare data becomes more complex and voluminous, FHIR's adaptability in exchanging data is key to addressing these evolving needs. This includes expanding its resource definitions, improving its support for real-time data exchange, and ensuring its standards are in line with the latest developments in healthcare and technology.
This ensures that patient data can be shared seamlessly across various platforms and organisations, enhancing the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery. FHIR plays a key role in achieving this by providing a standardised framework for data exchange.
It's well-suited for comprehensive patient records and reports. FHIR, on the other hand, is more flexible and adaptable, designed for real-time data exchange and interoperability across healthcare systems.
It uses modern web technologies and supports a wider range of data types and interactions, making it more suited for dynamic data access and integration in various healthcare applications.