The HL7 FHIR standard provides healthcare systems with a common set of APIs allowing efficient data exchange. This helps reduce costs, ensures compliance with industry norms, and optimizes workflow.
Resources are modular pieces of information with human-readable descriptions. They can be used standalone or bundled into clinical documents for patient care.
Better Patient Care
The healthcare industry is changing, and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) can help to improve patient care and decision-making in a digital age. It can bring greater visibility into healthcare data for patients and their families and support better communication across providers. It can also facilitate using new technologies like telemedicine for more advanced and effective treatment.
In addition, the FHIR standard is designed to be flexible. It uses “resources,” similar to building blocks representing standardized clinical and administrative data. These can be “profiled,” which allows you to modify them to meet specific use cases and workflows without affecting existing applications. For example, you can create an extension for the Patient resource that includes data like gender identity, religion, or place of birth.
This flexibility is essential because it allows developers to build the best solutions for their needs without adapting to a single healthcare system. It also means that upgrades and changes can be made quickly, essential in a field where the speed of change constantly increases.
Better Healthcare Decision-Making
The ability to easily share data across healthcare systems enables better decision-making. It also reduces the cost of transferring large amounts of data.
FHIR is a modern API standard connecting different healthcare systems, making transferring and uploading data easier. This means medical professionals can make better decisions faster, improving patient care.
The core of FHIR are resources, like building blocks representing standardized clinical and administrative data. They can be combined through references to create meaningful use cases. They can also be extended through profiles to fit specific workflows precisely.
For example, one healthcare provider used FHIR to develop an application that allows disabled patients to communicate with their caregivers in a way that’s easy for them to understand. This app also helps improve patient outcomes by enabling the patient to access all their health records in a single place. In addition, it allows them to plan treatments and keep track of their progress more effectively. This leads to a better overall experience for the patient and a higher return on investment for the healthcare provider.
Lower Costs
Healthcare organizations generate enormous amounts of data for clinical use and need a faster, more efficient way to sort and share this information securely. This is where FHIR comes in.
FHIR offers a suite of simple and standard APIs to support the transmission of healthcare data across different technologies and software environments. This means developers can build applications with the same data standards as the systems they’re working with within the field, reducing development time and improving the speed of access to information.
With FHIR, medical devices from multiple vendors can communicate seamlessly with EHRs in clinics and hospitals, and information that previously existed in data silos can now be combined into a single patient record in real-time. This streamlines workflows, reduces redundancies and helps improve the efficiency of healthcare providers.
At its core, FHIR is a set of building blocks called “resources,” which represent standardized clinical and administrative information. These resources can be grouped into collections that form clinical documents. They can also be extended through a process known as profiling to accommodate specific needs and use cases without compromising the overall integrity of information.
Increased Efficiency
Health data is collected and stored in a multitude of systems. FHIR allows a unified approach to connect all the data sources that healthcare providers, patients, specialists, and labs need.
This means doctors will have all the data they need to make decisions quickly and efficiently. It also allows patients to access their information and participate in their care. This will lead to smoother workflows and less redundant work.
One of the primary problems with existing healthcare IT systems is that they need to communicate more effectively. FHIR solves this problem by using modern common internet standards and creating a framework for interoperability.
For example, FHIR provides a standard for exchanging data between different healthcare systems. These APIs are based on standard web technologies, which lower the learning curve for new developers and reduce the time it takes to build an application. In addition, the standardized formats allow for more efficient data transfer. This is especially true for unstructured data, which accounts for 80% of today’s health IT systems.
Better Security
As healthcare data moves between different systems and applications, it can become disorganized. This can make it difficult for physicians to access the information they need for the best care. FHIR helps reduce this problem by enabling better data exchanges between healthcare systems.
This technology uses standardized APIs and structures that allow different healthcare platforms to talk to one another. This improves healthcare data quality and reduces the time required to exchange it.
Additionally, FHIR makes it easier for developers to create healthcare apps that can connect to EHRs and other health platforms. This is because it is built on a modern web-based suite of technologies, and lowers the barriers to entry for developers who do not have healthcare backgrounds.
FHIR primarily focuses on security, ensuring that the data it exchanges meets the highest standards of privacy and protection. It also provides that any apps using it are compatible with a patient’s current medical system and do not introduce new risks.
