Set your care organization on FHIR!
FHIR: The standard of choice for data exchange
FHIR is much more flexible than its HL7 predecessors and lends itself to all forms of communication in healthcare. However, the user friendliness of existing web technology creates opportunities, especially in the areas of mobile apps and other Internet applications, for patients and healthcare providers in hospitals, at home or in the field. The government has also drawn the FHIR card and has asked to use this standard for making laboratory results, among other things, accessible.
One of the great benefits of FHIR is that it allows new applications, developed using the most recent technologies, to easily request or obtain information from information systems in care institutions. It is not easy for these applications to obtain patient data via an interface with the current HL7 V2 standard.
There are also benefits for software developers. It is faster for them to use a RESTful Web Service than the FTP- or TCP/IP-socket-(MLLP-)based communication of a text file with unreadable structure that uses cryptic delimiters without meta-information.
Besides that, this standard is easier and less expensive to develop than its HL7 predecessors, such as CDA, and it is extensive enough for an individual approach.
Let’s zoom in for a moment
FHIR offers an alternative to document-centric approaches by exposing discrete data elements directly as services. This allows basic health care elements, such as patients, admissions, diagnostic reports and medications, to each be retrieved and manipulated through their own resource URLs.
This standard makes the exchange of data with electronic patient records and other information systems much more efficient, to the extent that we can now talk about true interoperability. For the digital support of the patient as a partner in the care chain, or even with the patient in the driver’s seat over the first and second lines of care, the importance of FHIR will only increase.
More information about FHIR can be found at www.hl7.org/fhir.
Amaron’s FHIR Station
The good news is that Amaron has already created interfaces between countless systems in many healthcare institutions and therefore knows all the ins and outs of the messages. We can now easily set up a FHIR Station in all these institutions. This will break open the world of HL7 V2 messages for new applications and services that support FHIR. For example, SOMEDI already uses the FHIR Station from Amaron to access reports.
Do you want to prepare your care organization for FHIR?
Then contact us at: info@amaron.be.
