FHIRside Chats 

Corepoint founder Dave Shaver recently visited with the Corepoint and Rhapsody engineering teams to discuss all things FHIR. Shaver covered the motivation behind the creation of FHIR and where the FHIR market is headed. Though the two-hour presentation was geared toward Lyniate employees, we've highlighted six short clips to share with the greater market. 

And because the FHIR-isms are endless, we've called these Dave Shaver's FHIRside Chats.

What Was the Motivation for FHIR®?

Synopsis: One of the primary goals with HL7 FHIR was to change the healthcare IT standards process to be more modern with encoding standards. The next goal was to impact health IT. If we change the way we build a standard, hopefully we can impact the way we deliver technology to health care providers, which in turn will improve health or at a minimum, improve the quality of the experience of care.

When Was FHIR® Conceived?

Synopsis: FHIR was conceived in 2012, and three major draft standards were developed for trial use. On the last day of 2018, the fourth release was published and went normative. It was intended at that point that it would be the stable version of the standard.

What, Exactly, Is Interoperability?

Synopsis: Healthcare interoperability happens when two vendors that have never met on the playing field come together having implemented a standard and it works. This is ad-hoc interoperability. Bespoke interoperability, on the other hand, happens when there is a profile that somebody has gone through and documented in great detail. Healthcare organizations all implement to that profile, and it's plug-and-play.

The Advantage of Standardization

Synopsis: An interesting aspect of FHIR is that we now have a standard data model. This is the magic that happens when there's no debate about how many pieces of a name there are. There isn't any debate about where to store the patient gender. That's the advantage of standardization. The goal through standardization is to eliminate the barriers to gain access.

Disruption with FHIR®

Synopsis: There's a crazy notion that we'll build applications that will plug into any EMR and provide third-party access to the user experience. Could this really work? Will vendors really agree to provide this level of access to their health information system? When FHIR came about and the concept of SMART on FHIR was born, this idea got much more interesting.

When Will We See FHIR® Go Mainstream?

Synopsis: What does mainstream FHIR mean? It means we access data at the source of truth. We modernize our infrastructure. We'll move from transactions such as HL7 v2 and CDA to discrete data. These transactions will be smaller and much higher volume, so we'll be exchanging FHIR resources rather than giant HL7 v2 messages. This will lead to an increased breadth of care coordination.

Whitepapers on FHIR 


For more videos on FHIR, we recommend these short clips. 

Will FHIR replace HL7 V2?

When will EMRs have FHIR APIs available?

How will FHIR ensure better consistency