As most hospital executives know, keeping up with the zillions of standards and technology specifications getting introduced or refined can take hours. Add in time spent making sure technology is in accordance with ever-evolving regulations, and CIOs' schedules start to rival those of their physician peers.
But beginning two months ago, a new standards framework known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR, has been developed and promoted by interoperability organization Health Level Seven (HL7) International.
The framework is starting to find its way into the spotlight. In December, HL7 announced the launch of the Argonaut Project, an initiative created to address the recommendations of the JASON Task Force, a joint task force of the HIT Standards and Policy Committees. The goal of the newly formed Argonaut Project—which includes members of athenahealth, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cerner, Epic, Intermountain Healthcare, Mayo Clinic, MEDITECH, McKesson, Partners HealthCare System, The Advisory Board Company and SMART at the Boston Children's Hospital Informatics Program—is to accelerate the development and adoption of FHIR.
Healthcare Dive caught up with HL7 CEO Dr. Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD to get his take on the most important things CIOs should know about about FHIR—and why it's worthy of attention.
Q: What exactly is FHIR?
A: FHIR is a platform that combines the best features of existing HL7 standards with modern Web technologies. The existing standards upon which FHIR is built provide a framework that is easy to develop and even easier to implement. FHIR [comprises] discrete modular components, called resources, which can be reused and re-purposed. To this FHIR adds state-of-the-art, open specifications to enable security and privacy. FHIR is uniquely agile for very rapidly creating new solutions that simplify data aggregation and address the needs of the mobile computing environment.
2. Why is FHIR emerging now?
There is an increasing demand for interoperability that cannot be easily solved in legacy systems. These approaches are often encumbered by optionality and customization that may render nearly identical systems (from a single vendor) incapable of exchanging structured data. Not only does FHIR help to solve this problem, but it also allows for data queries that are cumbersome or impossible with previous technologies.
3. What are a few reasons the standard is important?
FHIR is fast to learn, fast to develop and fast to implement. Implementation times are often reduced by a factor of ten or more, and the cost for such projects may decline proportionately. FHIR has been developed to integrate well with existing legacy standards, such as the Version 2 family and CDA (Clinical Document Architecture). FHIR is remarkably well understood by clinicians, who are able to recognize use cases and work flow. With the advent of the Argonaut Project, FHIR has the support for both development and implementation by the leading EHR vendors and by the healthcare systems that have made a commitment to implement FHIR solutions.
4. What else should hospital CIOs know about FHIR?
FHIR was developed with the implementer in mind from the very start. Not only can FHIR coexist with existing systems, but FHIR also enables innovative uses of complex data. FHIR provides a solution to many real-world problems in the environment of accountable care, and yet FHIR is sufficiently flexible to address the requirements of emerging scientific discovery, such as genomics. Like all other HL7 specifications, FHIR is free.
