Is FHIR® a burning issue? An Introductory Guide on the Benefits of FHIR for Healthcare Organizations

This article explores the advantages of FHIR over other standards, its resource-based structure, and how it leverages RESTful APIs for efficient data exchange. Learn how RAYLYTIC is applying FHIR to enhance healthcare data management, integrate Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs), and streamline patient care across diverse healthcare environments.

More data in more places: The reality of modern healthcare

Improving health outcomes depends on seamless access to healthcare data by providers, researchers, and even patients themselves. However, the complexity and diversity of healthcare data systems often hinders their ability to communicate and exchange critical health data with each other – a concept known as interoperability in information technology.

FHIR® is helping to make healthcare data systems more interoperable by providing a standardized framework for exchanging healthcare information, enabling them to connect and share data in a fast, organized, and secure way.

In this blog article, we’ll take a closer look at what FHIR is, how it is different from other interoperability standards, and what benefits it has to offer healthcare organizations.

What is FHIR®?

FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), launched in 2012 by the standards development organization HL7 (Health Level Seven International), is a forward-looking healthcare interoperability standard. Like all interoperability standards, it aims to harmonize both the meaning of healthcare data elements and the underlying technology used to exchange this information.

FHIR healthcare provides secure and usable interfaces
What is the difference between FHIR® and other interoperability standards?

What sets FHIR® apart from other interoperability standards like HL7v2 and HL7v3, however, can be summed up under its usability. HL7v2 uses an increasingly antiquated and customization-heavy text-based format. This means that most every HL7v2 implementation is different, making extensive data mapping necessary for communication between different organizations. HL7v3 is widely considered to be extremely complex and difficult to implement for smaller healthcare organizations. FHIR®, on the other hand, aims to reduce this complexity through its easy-to-understand, human-readable data model and its compatibility with most major web protocols and multimedia data types.

Another growing interoperability standard in the healthcare space is OMOP, or Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership. While both OMOP and FHIR boast practical data models for modern healthcare systems, their primary differences lie in their intended use cases and specific strengths. FHIR is designed primarily for real-time clinical data exchange and application integration, making it ideal for scenarios such as patient portals, mobile health apps, and electronic health record (EHR) interoperability. OMOP, on the other hand, is well-suited for standardizing and analyzing large volumes of observational health data in research contexts. So, let’s take a closer look at FHIR:

FHIR® is Resource-Based

FHIR® employs a robust clinical data model built on Resources. Resources refer to structured sets of multimedia data elements that represent recognizable healthcare concepts, which makes FHIR particularly suitable for clinical use. Currently, FHIR® defines a catalog of about 150 resources. Common examples of resources include:

  • Patient: Contains demographic and identifying information about the patient, such as patient name, birthdate, and contact details.

  • Encounter: Primarily used to record information about the actual activities that occurred during a patient-physician interaction.

  • Observation: Measurements and simple assertions made about a patient, device, or other subject.

  • Medication: Used for the identification and definition of a medication, including ingredients, for the purposes of prescribing, dispensing, and administering a medication as well as for making statements about medication use.

The following example illustrates a FHIR Procedure resource in JSON format. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a human-readable data format that makes it easy to represent structured clinical information:
FHIR Example JSON

Benefits of FHIR®

FHIR’s resource-based approach offers several key advantages for users. It allows them to access precisely the information they need — and only that information — while knowing exactly where to find it.

  1. Modularity: Resources are modular, meaning they can be reused and combined as needed, providing a much more scalable solution for modern healthcare applications. For example, for a hospital to transmit an order to the radiology department using FHIR, it would generally use the ServiceRequest and DiagnosticReport resources. The ServiceRequest resource is used to transmit a request for a diagnostic service, such as a radiology examination.

  2. Flexibility: The resource “Observation,” for example, can be used to record a patient’s blood pressure, a laboratory test result, or even a behavioral assessment, demonstrating its versatility across different medical contexts.

  3. Standardization: Common data elements are consistently defined across different systems, improving data quality and reducing errors.

  4. Efficiency: The modular nature of resources allows for faster development and implementation of healthcare applications.

The relationship between FHIR® and RESTful APIs

Read most anything about FHIR and you’ll likely encounter the term RESTful API. FHIR relies on RESTful API (Application Program Interfaces) to exchange data.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications. In the context of FHIR, this means that healthcare systems can easily request or send specific pieces of health information using standard web protocols.

This approach offers several advantages:

  • Simplicity: RESTful APIs are easy to understand and implement, reducing the learning curve for developers.

  • Scalability: The stateless nature of REST, where each request from a client to a server contains all the information needed to understand and process the request, allows for better performance and easier scaling of applications.

  • Flexibility: RESTful APIs can handle different types of calls and return data in various formats, making them adaptable to different use cases in healthcare.

The following graphic illustrates the architecture of an example healthcare system utilizing FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) for data exchange:

Graphic adapted from: Santosh Kumar on medium.com

💡The FHIR API enables communication between various applications, such as Mobile Apps, Patient Portals, and Internal and Partner Applications, all operating under a RESTful architecture. Key FHIR resources, including Patient, Encounter, Observation, Medications, Allergies, Vitals, and Order, are accessible through the FHIR Server, facilitating efficient access and exchange of critical healthcare data while adhering to regulatory criteria.

Benefits of FHIR for Healthcare Organizations

Together, RESTful APIs and FHIR Resources streamline data exchange and enable interoperability between systems. Resources represent the data to be exchanged, while RESTful APIs represent the mechanism for exchanging those data. Through this combination, FHIR can offer several benefits to healthcare organizations, including:

  1. Enhanced interoperability: FHIR facilitates seamless data exchange between diverse healthcare systems.

  2. Improved scalability: The modular structure of FHIR allows for easy expansion and adaptation to growing healthcare needs.

  3. Simplified implementation: FHIR’s intuitive design and use of familiar web technologies reduce development time and complexity.

  4. Robust security and privacy: FHIR incorporates strong data protection measures to safeguard sensitive health information.

How we are applying FHIR

By bulking up our current solutions with FHIR compatibility, we are working to ensure seamless integration with other systems, avoiding the challenges of incompatible datasets.

This approach streamlines workflows and improves data management across various healthcare systems. Clinics and healthcare professionals enjoy enhanced collaboration and more efficient patient care delivery. For healthcare organizations, FHIR-compliant solutions offer cost savings and increased scalability, making it easier to adapt to evolving healthcare needs and technologies.

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