Health Level Seven International (HL7®) has announced the launch of its Argonaut Project, an initiative that will address the recommendations of the JASON Task Force, a joint task force of the HIT Standards and Policy Committees. The purpose of the Argonaut Project is to rapidly develop Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a first-generation API and Core Data Services specification to enable expanded information sharing for electronic health records and other health information technologies. The project will accelerate current FHIR development efforts to provide implementation guides and specs to the industry by the spring of 2015.
The Argonaut Project is comprised of the following companies and organizations:
- athenahealth
- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- Cerner
- Epic
- Intermountain Healthcare
- Mayo Clinic
- MEDITECH
- McKesson
- Partners HealthCare System
- SMART at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program
- The Advisory Board Company
In a press release issued by HL7, HIT Standards Committee Co-Chair and CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center John Halamka, MD, said HL7’s FHIR is interoperability’s future. “In 2014, there has been a perfect storm of alignment among government, industry, academia, provider organizations and innovators that FHIR is our best opportunity to accelerate interoperability. At this point in history we have an unprecedented opportunity to apply additional resources and focus, producing a simple, consensus-based implementation guide for query/response transactions in healthcare using the same type of technologies that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have already implemented at scale.” He then emphasized that “We are not creating a new organization to do this work; instead we are all unifying around HL7 as an ANSI-accredited standards development organization to deliver what we all need.”
Last month HITECH Answers and Medicity hosted a webinar taking a look at FHIR’s capabilities and impact on interoperabilty. Is the Future of Health Data Exchange on “FHIR”? was moderated by Brian Ahier and featured a leading panel of experts that included Dr. Halamka.
You can download a windows media file of the webinar to save to your desktop.
You can also view the YouTube version below.