Playing with FHIR
The JP Morgan Healthcare conference descended on San Francisco last week along with severe rainstorms that helped to end California’s drought but drenched a lot of attendees running frantically from hotel to hotel.
Despite the inclement weather, an estimated 30,000 people were in town to learn about the major trends for the healthcare industry in 2017.
One of the main themes of the conference was how to improve patient engagement and care accessibility by leveraging technology. There were examples of how tele-health expands a patient’s choice on when and how they receive care and how mobile devices provide an “always-on” communication channel between patients and their care providers.
Technology is proving to be a vital component for a successful disruption of the healthcare industry and I believe that a lot of this innovation will come from start-ups that can approach problems with a fresh perspective. However, they will still need access to the existing healthcare system in order to gain any traction.
This brings me to the new FHIR standard.
FHIR stands for Fast Health # Resources (pronounced “fire”) and it was created by Health Level Seven International (HL7).
The goal is to provide the industry with an Application Programming Interface “API” for exchanging Electronic Health Records “EHR”. To write this in one, acronym-laden sentence – FHIR, created by HL7 is an open API for EHR. Pretty impressive if I have to say so myself.
Here at Appstem, we have started dipping our toes in the sand and working in FHIR sandboxes created by Epic, Cerner and AllScripts and our initial reaction is positive. We found that this HL7 version is easier to work with because it uses a modern, web-based suite of API technologies including an HTTP-based RESTful protocol, HTML and Cascading Style Sheets for user interface and JSON or XML for exchanging data.
In addition, each basic element of healthcare like patients, admissions, diagnostic reports and medications are accessed via their own resource URL. This allows the data to stay in its own silo while sitting on top of a super-fast highway with easy to understand road signs.
Let us know if you’re thinking of creating a mobile application that integrates with FHIR. We’re already enjoying our time in the FHIR sandbox but it’s always more fun with others.