Patient data can be represented in a multitude of ways such as medications, encounters or images via Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Sharing of these data among clinicians or healthcare professionals can be of immense importance in providing proper and improved health care to patients.
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a standard, created by the Health Level Seven International (HL7) healthcare standards organization, for exchanging healthcare data/information electronically, providing a means for representing and sharing information among clinicians and organizations in a standard way regardless of how local EHRs represent or store the data. Thus, interoperability of data among different organizations is promoted, thereby making the required medical data readily accessible.
FHIR describes data formats and elements pertaining to the EHRs and provides an application programming interface (API) for exchanging EHRs. FHIR combines the best features of previous standards from HL7, like HL7 version 2.x and HL7 version 3.x., into a common specification while being flexible enough to meet needs of a wide variety of use cases within the healthcare ecosystem.
With the use of modern web-based suite of API technology, including a HTTP-based RESTful protocol and a choice of JSON, XML or RDF for data representation, FIHR has been faster and easier to implement than ever before. This facilitates interoperability between legacy healthcare systems, making it easy to provide healthcare information to healthcare providers and individuals on a wide variety of devices from computers to tablets to cell phones, and to allow third-party application developers to develop medical applications that can be easily integrated into existing systems.
Why FHIR?
There is a tremendous potential in connecting the billions of data points stored in electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical trial records across thousands of medical systems around the country for fostering public health. However, lack of a standardized data sharing system gravely hampers the used of those medical records in discovering novel diagnosis and treatment regimens. This is where FHIR comes in: it allows EHRs to “speak” with third-party applications using a common exchange standard to unlock the data stored within them.
Benefits of FHIR
- Provides faster, real-time access to quality data
- Reduces burden for reporting quality measures
- Promotes interoperability
- Reduces effort to implement new measures
- Improves alignment between eCQMs & clinical decision support
WiseMD from WiseYak, is an AI-powered FHIR compatible EMR solution which can be tailored to your organization’s specific needs. WiseMD is a FHIR compliant platform enabling integration with other FHIR-based applications for capturing, visualizing and analyzing patient medical data. Our embedded dashboards and unified data model make it much easier for clinicians and administrators to track down and understand the cost and quality of medical care specific to each patient. Being a FHIR-based application, WiseMD can scale vertically and horizontally to cost-effectively handle any workload, data or users.
