Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR): Current Status in the Healthcare System

摘要

The inception of EHR has shown a lot of potentials and virtually eliminated the drawbacks of paper-based medical notes. However, the transition has not been seamless due to various technical and political drawbacks. One of the major technical challenges is interoperability. The biomedical community has established various structural and semantic standards to capture and share medical data across heterogeneous systems such as ASTM Community Care Record, Health Level 7 (HL7) Clinical Care Document, etc. The HL7 organization has recently published Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) - a standard to improve interoperability, overcome shortcomings of the previous standard and integrate lightweight web services. This article provides an overview of HL7 FHIR, its concepts and literature review on its current status, usage, and adoption. Based on the thorough research and literature review, the authors strongly believe that FHIR can bridge interoperability gap between the growing number of disparate and variety of healthcare entities.