Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. It provides a framework for data exchange between healthcare systems, enabling interoperability and facilitating the exchange of patient data across different healthcare organizations and systems.
Developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7), FHIR is designed to address the complexities of the healthcare industry’s data structures. It leverages existing logical and theoretical models to provide a consistent, easy-to-implement, and rigorous mechanism for exchanging data between healthcare applications.
FHIR is built around the concept of ‘resources,’ which are the smallest units of interoperability – coherent and meaningful chunks of information. These resources can be combined to solve clinical and administrative problems practically. Each resource has a common way to define and represent it, including metadata, a human-readable part, and a set of common data elements. It supports four main exchange paradigms: RESTful API, messaging, services, and documents. The RESTful API paradigm is widely used due to its simplicity and the extensive tooling available for RESTful APIs.
