(FHIR) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources

Health Level Seven International® (HL7®) has many Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) resources on the HL7 website including a FHIR overview:

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has created several FHIR Fact Sheets.

What is FHIR and how is it being used?

It allows healthcare information, including clinical and administrative data, to be available securely to those who have a need to access it, and to those who have the right to do so for the benefit of a patient receiving care.

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a Health Level Seven International® (HL7®) standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. The healthcare community is adopting this next generation exchange framework to advance interoperability. Electronic health records (EHRs) represent patient data in different ways (e.g., medications, encounters) and FHIR provides a means for representing and sharing information among clinicians and organizations in a standard way regardless of the ways local EHRs represent or store the data. FHIR combines the best features of previous standards into a common specification, while being flexible enough to meet needs of a wide variety of use cases within the healthcare ecosystem. FHIR focuses on implementation and uses the latest web technologies to aid rapid adoption.

What are the three main components of FHIR?

These three components (resources, references, profiles) are the main aspects of FHIR development.