With the passing time, there has been increase in the usage of EHRs. Catering to so many demand and needs of them, FHIR is been introduced aiming to simplify the implementation process without bearing on the information integrity and authenticity. How FHIR helps with this? It leverages the existing theoretical and logical models and prototypes and provides a simple to execute mechanism to exchange data in between different healthcare applications.
The objective is to create a base set of resources that could meet the diversified meet of common use case scenarios. And, it is supposed to be used and implemented as a standalone data exchange standard or in link with the existing ones in a seamless manner. It is one of the fast and efficient alternatives to all document centric strategies as it depicts data elements as services. In fact, many high profile players in the healthcare and informatics field have been showing keen interest in implementing it these days. This is one reason Santeware is showing high interest in the FHIR growing market in order to facilitate it with its variety of expert services.
What is FHIR you ask?
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a framework being developed by HL7 organization which sets global healthcare data standards, rules and patterns to improve the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of health information for over 20 years. FHIR evolved from and preserved the best features of HL7’s earlier standards (V2, V3, and CDA). Importantly, FHIR implementation offers improvements over existing standards, most of which stem from its’s use of modern web technologies that are implementation friendly and already widely adopted while ensuring privacy and security.
FHIR standard concentrates on electronic healthcare information exchange. It uses basic building blocks called “resources” to model healthcare data in a way that is easier for healthcare providers to use and share clinical data as needed without compromising security or violating HIPAA. It is vendor-neutral and can be used as a stand-alone healthcare data standard for information exchange. It can be used in partnership with existing widely used standards also.
FHIR makes it feasible and easy to get the access to right set of data from any device or an application. Simply by devising standard URLs for different packets of data, its annihilates and cuts down the requirement to exchange individual documents or any information back and forth in between systems along with making sure that the different applications will point out to the right and same set of information at the same time.
FHIR will help developers and professionals in creating more intuitive and user friendly applications integrated with web browsers functionality ensuring quick and trust-able access to the relevant data irrespective of which EHR or application is been used, leading to several positives. Few of them are been enlisted in below:
- Easy and hassle-free integration and implementation
- Enhances the healthcare delivery speed by making data easily accessible and in a readable format
- Structures and standardizes the data for machine-based processing and other automated clinical support
- Reduces the time-consuming document-based information exchange system and feeding in the information in direct into workflows
- Offers inbuilt traceability mechanisms to HL7 RIM and other content based models supporting alignment with the existing practices and prototypes, even if they don’t have any knowledge of RIM or any other deviation of HL7 v3
Conclusion and Santeware’s Role in providing FHIR Services
All the health technology experts understand well that FHIR can be used for accessing data inside some legacy systems through the FHIR API. It is also great for storage and analytics and can be used as a backend data model for building new healthcare solutions. At Santeware we recognized this use case several years ago and nowadays, our main product is the FHIR backend, which we use for the development of solutions for our clients. Please click HERE to find out more on FHIR and HL7 services provided by Santeware Healthcare Solutions.
