Sponsored: Playing with FHIR

By Russ Leftwich, MD, senior clinical advisor for interoperability, InterSystems and Matt Spielman, HealthShare product manager, InterSystems.

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is an important standard for the future of healthcare systems trying to survive in a world of value-based reimbursement, coordinated care and population health management. All such initiatives require collaboration supported by shared health records.

The complex route to clinical interoperability
As the healthcare world has become more digitized, we’ve gained opportunities for improved, coordinated care. However, seamless communication between providers has been difficult, in part because of the complexity of existing information-sharing standards (such as HL7) dating back almost 30 years.

A better way
More recently, a group of industry experts began to look at the best practices other industries had used in creating consumer applications, such as travel management, personal banking and social media across platforms. Thus FHIR was born.

The FHIR standard is easier to set up than HL7. It is effective at querying one system at a time, and for facilitating point-to-point communications. To create comprehensive views of patients across all sources, you also need a health informatics platform to coordinate connections between systems. And to build population health applications, FHIR needs to serve as the conduit to a robust, timely health record repository that spans all information sources, and all information standards. FHIR is to interoperability in healthcare what a battery-powered drill is to a screwdriver. You still need other tools in the toolbox.

Widespread adoption is underway
FHIR eventually will enable healthcare organizations to search across different servers the way we now look for various types of data using the Internet. What’s missing, but being created, are definitions for the different data elements involved in healthcare. There are a lot more of those than there are for your typical social media and financial transactions.

For example, a bank ATM has 10 data elements in one terminology system. One widely used healthcare terminology system has some 350,000 data elements. The challenge is in defining those data elements precisely in a way everybody can agree on, so we can exchange data freely, and have the data mean the same thing to the receiver as to the sender.

Lots of potential, no silver bullet
FHIR has great potential, particularly with green-field development and a solid infrastructure to support it. Whether it’s an EHR or whether it’s a health information exchange, it needs a clinical platform solution sitting behind it that provides value from the data that FHIR delivers. When we embrace FHIR, and back it up with the robust solutions and platforms available to us, then we can not only move beyond our interoperability woes but also realize the full potential of shared health information.

To read more about playing with FHIR, read the full whitepaper. For more information regarding InterSystems, visit www.intersystems.com