HHS Idea Lab

A Primer on FHIR

By Paula Braun – Not long ago, health records were paper files locked away in cabinets. Thanks to advancements in technology and national incentives, these records are largely digitized and their roles have evolved beyond a means of documenting care. Now, people look to data captured in electronic health records (EHRs) to create a deeper understanding of wellness and diseases, identify threats to public health, and determine what interventions work best for whom.

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Are Federal Health Initiatives on FHIR?

By Mark Scrimshire – The hottest topic in Healthcare interoperability right now is FHIR (pronounced “Fire”) – HL7’s Fast Health Interoperability Resource framework. FHIR has caught the imagination and attention of developers across the Healthcare world by offering a developer-friendly Application Programming Interface (API) and a rich set of simple, but flexible standard data formats.


Opening the Spigots of Health Data in the U.S. and UK

By Susannah Fox – I never feel so American as when I’m traveling abroad. And my most recent trip was the pinnacle of this experience since I was representing the U.S. government at the Health and Care Innovation Expo organized by the UK’s National Health System (NHS) in Manchester, England.


Promoting Dignity, Through Data Accuracy, For The Dead

By Paula Braun – All information captured on death certificates – such as race, gender, and marital status – matters. In my previous blog post, I wrote about the importance of the cause-of-death fields; however, every element of the certificate is important. Capturing the information timely and accurately is more than just an administrative requirement with public health benefits.


The Future of Aging and Technology

By Susannah Fox – You might be wondering why a Chief Technology Officer would be part of a conference on aging. Isn’t tech a young person’s game? First of all, I love Alan Kay’s definition: Technology is anything invented after you were born.


Big Data for a Big Problem: Putting Data To Work To Tackle Obesity

By Edward L. Hunter – The obesity epidemic has far-reaching consequences: it is a primary driver of continually climbing health care costs, it foreshadows an unhealthier and costlier workforce that will burden global economic competitiveness, and it is reversing more than a century of progress in which each generation lived longer and healthier lives than the one before it.



How We Die Matters: Improving Cause-of-Death Data

By Paula Braun – It’s a familiar narrative. A crime drama opens with a dead body. Police are on the scene taking testimony from eyewitnesses, if there are any. A detective arrives and unravels the clues. How did this person die? More often than not, the answers aren’t obvious. That’s what makes it interesting.