By Anthony Murray, Chief Interoperability Officer, MRO
LinkedIn: Anthony Murray
LinkedIn: MRO
What is FHIR?
The HL7® FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard is the accepted standard for exchanging healthcare information, regardless of how or where the information is stored. By enabling secure access to both clinical and administrative data, FHIR ensures that healthcare providers can access the information they need to deliver optimal patient care.
Developed by the Health Level Seven® (HL7®) standards organization through a collaborative process, FHIR emerged in 2012 to meet the growing demand for faster, more efficient methods of data exchange in the healthcare industry. As the volume of health data continues to expand, the need for care providers and consumers to share data in real-time, using modern internet technologies, has become paramount.
FHIR leverages widely used internet standards which facilitates the easy sharing of discrete packets of information known as Resources. By building on existing technologies familiar to software developers, FHIR significantly lowers the barriers for new developers to create applications that meet healthcare needs.
With FHIR, the healthcare industry is poised to provide a modern, efficient, and secure way to handle the exchange of clinical data.
What is FHIR vs. API?
FHIR and APIs (application programming interfaces) serve distinct yet complementary roles in healthcare data management. FHIR is foremost a standardized framework specifically designed to enhance interoperability among disparate healthcare systems. It achieves this through a common data model and a RESTful API architecture that supports seamless data exchange. FHIR’s strength lies in its ability to represent diverse healthcare data elements as discrete resources, each uniquely identified for easy access and modification across applications and platforms.
This contrasts with APIs in general, which serve as broader interfaces for software applications to communicate and interact with each other or with users. While APIs facilitate data access and manipulation, FHIR goes further by standardizing how healthcare data is structured and exchanged, thereby promoting greater efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and improved patient care through enhanced interoperability.
Here are four key reasons why FHIR is particularly valuable to medical record requesters:
- Interoperability
One of the most significant benefits of FHIR is its ability to facilitate interoperability between different healthcare systems. Interoperability refers to the seamless exchange of information across various platforms, regardless of how that information is stored or structured. The FHIR standard is a critical application throughout ever-evolving healthcare technology. MRO, a leader in clinical data exchange, successfully integrates with a wide variety of systems and healthcare platforms. An example of successful integration is MRO’s Clinical Data Exchange Platform (CDXP) that utilizes FHIR to enable different healthcare systems to “talk” to each other, ensuring that critical patient information flows smoothly and accurately between entities involved in patient care. - Standardized Requests
CDXP allows medical record requesters to submit requests using standardized FHIR resources and data models. This standardization simplifies the entire process of requesting specific medical records by using a consistent approach. Requesters ensure that the information they seek is accurate, complete, and consistent, which results in the reduced risk of errors and discrepancies, even when utilizing different systems that have varying formats. Standardized requests also ensure repeatable processes that are scalable, which is crucial for organizations handling large volumes of data. - Efficient Retrieval
CDXP’s FHIR APIs enable medical record requesters to retrieve documents in binary form, which makes the requested records easily accessible and ready for integration into their own systems. This efficiency eliminates unnecessary complexity and additional steps that were often involved in traditional data retrieval methods. By providing a straightforward endpoint for document retrieval, FHIR ensures that the process is both simple and reliable. This efficiency is particularly important in healthcare settings where timely access to accurate information can significantly impact patient care and outcomes. - Regulatory Compliance
The healthcare industry is heavily regulated to protect patient privacy and data security. The FHIR standard is designed to meet the requirements of various regulatory bodies, ensuring compliance with privacy and security regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). FHIR standards recommend the use of robust authentication mechanisms like OAuth 2.0 to ensure only authorized users can access data. Furthermore, FHIR strongly recommends using Transport Layer Security for all interactions to ensure data in transit is encrypted and secure, while also incorporating security and privacy considerations into the design and architecture of healthcare systems. It is critical to partner FHIR technology with a foundation of security, privacy and agnostic EHR utilization. In order to ensure privacy and security, MRO goes above and beyond to comply with industry expectations for secure clinical data exchange. To do this, MRO works individually with each provider to adhere to their unique requirements and restrictions based on federal, state, and site-specific policies. This compliance is critical for maintaining patient trust and ensuring sites avoid legal and financial penalties associated with data breaches or non-compliance. CDXP’s built-in security features help safeguard patient information, providing an added layer of protection in an increasingly digital world.
The adoption of FHIR brings immense value to medical record requesters by enabling interoperability, standardizing requests, improving retrieval efficiency, and ensuring regulatory compliance. As the healthcare industry continues to evolve and the volume of health data grows, MRO’s CDXP stands out as a robust solution that addresses the modern needs of clinical data exchange, and the release of healthcare information. By embracing FHIR, healthcare organizations can enhance their operations, support better patient care, and navigate the complexities of healthcare data with greater confidence and ease.
This article was originally published on the MRO blog and is republished here with permission.