FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource) is a set of standards for transferring electronic health data among various systems. It has become one of the most widely used protocols for connecting systems across different healthcare organizations and it aims at creating an application-based strategy for interoperability in healthcare information systems.
What is FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource)?
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a relatively new set of standards intended to provide interoperability in healthcare that makes it easier to transfer data between healthcare applications, such as electronic health records, and to describe data formats.
The scope of FHIR aims to incorporate public health, clinical care, financial considerations, and administration in addition to human and veterinary clinical trials. FHIR can assist in the maintenance, organization, and standardization of automated clinical decision support and other machine-based processes.
It aims to make applications simpler while maintaining the accuracy of the data gathered. Interoperability in healthcare creates a consistent, workable, and exact mechanism for data transmission across healthcare apps by utilizing existing logical and theoretical standards. The HL7 RIM (Reference Information Model) and other pertinent content standards are accessible using FHIR's built-in methods. This provides adherence with HL7's earlier stated guide and recommended practices without requiring the user to have in-depth knowledge of the RIM or other HL7 v3 sources.
Importance of FHIR in healthcare?
The smooth interoperability of healthcare data between various systems, including electronic health records (EHRs), hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, and more is one of the key advantages of FHIR. As a result, patients may receive higher-quality care since medical professionals will have access to more thorough information about their medical background.
Monitoring chronic illnesses, maintaining care plans, and communicating patient recovery status, treatment plans, and medication lists with family members and caretakers are just a few of the many uses for FHIR, an IT health solution. Moreover, patients get control over their records because they can set up notifications for any change in the care plan.
Every resource is connected to a specific identifier via FHIR. Like URLs simplifies website searches regardless of the web browser or device you have been using, FHIR makes it simple to gain access to the proper set of data from any device or application.FHIR removes and shortens the time-consuming process of sending data back and forth between computers by assigning standard URLs to various data packets.
Conclusion
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) developed a set of guidelines on how health data is transferred between clinical applications to ease that burden. It established skills that enable healthcare professionals to have standardized access to clinical healthcare data at right time, opening up new opportunities to enhance patient care. As, data will remain structured and uniform while being accessible, discoverable, and comprehensible with HL7 FHIR. This IT health solution offers real-time access to all patients' health information increasing the scope for improved workflow and communication by streamlining daily procedures.
