Why do Healthcare Organizations Need FHIR?
The Benefits of FHIR for Healthcare Providers
Five Use Cases of FHIR in Healthcare
Please select your cookie preferences before getting in touch
Thank you for reaching out to Sigma Software!
Please fill the form below. Our team will contact you shortly.
Sigma Software has offices in multiple locations in Europe, Northern America, Asia and Latin America.
USA
Sweden
Germany
Canada
Israel
Singapore
UAE
Australia
Austria
Ukraine
Poland
Argentina
Brazil
Bulgaria
Colombia
Czech Republic
Hungary
Mexico
Portugal
This guide provides healthcare professionals and organizations with the essential knowledge and tools to harness the power of FHIR to improve patient care and data accessibility in the evolving healthcare landscape
Why do Healthcare Organizations Need FHIR?
The Benefits of FHIR for Healthcare Providers
Five Use Cases of FHIR in Healthcare
The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an HL7 healthcare interoperability standard that enables disparate systems to exchange healthcare data using established data representations. These data representations in FHIR are clear and simple, accessible to both humans and computers, and strong enough to transfer complicated medical data when combined.
It’s similar to the software that takes a person to the right page when they type something into a Google search field. Standard URLs ensure that users can access the same website regardless of the operating system or device they’re using. FHIR has the potential to become the standard URL for the healthcare industry.
Traditionally, health information systems used by providers, hospitals, laboratories, and pharmacies have been siloed and weren’t designed to communicate data quickly or easily. Medical information about individuals has been fragmented due to a lack of interoperability between different health IT systems and a lack of data standards.
As a result, an individual’s information profile is presented differently in each organization’s system, leading physicians to attempt to make clinical decisions based on patient data that is incomplete, inaccurate, or inconsistent. Since physicians need comprehensive, accurate information to make treatment decisions for their patients, this is obviously a problem.
To ensure that data is easily sent and received across multiple healthcare systems, HL7 FHIR aims to promote and simplify the secure exchange of data between the many healthcare applications used by different vendors. FHIR is required because it streamlines implementation and ultimately increases the likelihood of interoperability by leveraging existing principles and processes.
FHIR improves patient care by enabling the easy, real-time use of health data. This complete, up-to-date view of a patient’s health data helps healthcare practitioners make informed, timely decisions that lead to better patient outcomes.
FHIR’s resource-oriented strategy and use of RESTful APIs make medical data more accessible and easier to transfer across platforms. This improved data visibility and interoperability can help improve medical management and reduce redundant tests and treatments.
By simplifying the exchange of healthcare data, FHIR offers significant benefits in reducing workflows and increasing productivity throughout medical facilities. By reducing organizational constraints, healthcare workers can spend more time caring for patients.
FHIR is the best option for creating online and mobile applications because it is compatible with current web technologies. By enabling easy communication with healthcare professionals and access to personal health information, this compatibility improves patient engagement.
FHIR’s adaptable and easy-to-use health information exchange structure opens the door to medical innovation and advancement. This structure enables the development of unique tools and services to improve patient care and streamline healthcare operations, supporting continuous innovation and improvement in healthcare.
With a growing regulatory emphasis on data interoperability, implementing FHIR can help healthcare organizations comply with laws such as the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule. This can help organizations avoid fines while maintaining a good reputation in the medical community.
FHIR is supported by a large international community of healthcare and IT professionals because it is a freely available standard created by HL7. This community provides helpful materials, guidance, and support for the implementation and use of FHIR, making it a trusted and sustainable option for healthcare data exchange.
In addition to well-known EHR companies like Epic and Cerner, industry titans like Google and Microsoft are embracing FHIR. Let’s take a look at the cutting-edge use cases that illustrate FHIR’s potential.
The Joint Commission is an organization dedicated to creating the standards, methods, and resources needed to improve quality assurance, especially those that impact patient safety. The FHIR standard is being used to extract and capture high-quality metrics from member organizations using a special data format designed to express medical quality data (the Health Quality Measures Format, or HQMF). The organization intends to extend on an early HL7 initiative in which quality metrics can be defined via FHIR. This will require the ability to transfer health quality measurement data via FHIR as well as the ability to define analytic algorithms in FHIR.
Apple Health Records uses FHIR standards to provide iPhone users with instant access to EHRs. By combining data from multiple healthcare providers, it creates a comprehensive and up-to-date medical summary for an individual. It includes important information such as medical conditions, immunizations, test results, prescriptions, and vital signs.
CoxHealth, a healthcare organization based in Missouri, is using an FHIR-powered application to provide more accurate diagnoses. Clinicians can use medical imaging, visualization, and machine learning through an application called VisualDx that runs on SMART on FHIR. This helps them compare known variants of certain diseases that affect the skin, hair, and nails to diagnose patients more accurately.
The SMART architecture enables applications that can be used across healthcare systems and by professionals, patients, and others. The U.S. government helped develop the open, free, standards-based SMART on FHIR API. It allows developers to build applications once and use them across the healthcare system.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Sync for Science (S4S) initiative to facilitate data synchronization for scientific studies. By making data exchange between people and researchers simple and secure, the initiative hopes to advance precision medical research.
FHIR’s enhanced data exchange capabilities raise important questions about the security and privacy of private patient information. It is extremely difficult to balance the need to protect patient information with the convenience of interoperability. Healthcare organizations must have strong security measures in place, such as secure data transmission and storage, and efficient patient consent management.
Professionals “map” data whenever there is a need to match fields from one database to another. In the case of FHIR requirements, data is mapped to FHIR resources. For example, suppose a patient resource is stored in a database in one format but needs to be in the FHIR format. There are two ways to approach this problem. The first option is to engage a team of data analysts to do it manually, but this would be a time-consuming and costly operation. The second is to use an FHIR mapper tool to automate the process of mapping healthcare data to an FHIR resource.
Although FHIR provides a standard for data exchange, discrepancies in data definitions and interpretations can still cause problems, known as semantic interoperability issues. A key issue is ensuring that each system perceives and interprets data in the same way. This requires mutual understanding and acceptance of the meaning and implementation of information.
With an enormous amount of data comes a variety of data challenges, such as duplicates and lookups. It is critical to address issues with patient matching, practitioner matching, and claims data matching. Maintain connections between transformed FHIR resources, such as patient and physician encounters.
Many healthcare organizations rely on legacy systems for everyday tasks. Integrating FHIRE, which is based on the latest Web standards, into these systems can be difficult. Overcoming this obstacle often requires major transformation efforts and potential disruption, requiring careful preparation and deliberate allocation of resources.
Another issue that can arise is the large volume of data that must be translated into the FHIR format. This is easily overcome by using a powerful conversion tool and cloud technologies.
In global healthcare, big data is big business. According to RBC Capital Markets, “the compound annual growth rate of healthcare data will reach 36% by 2025.”
As the volume of healthcare data grows, hospitals, medical professionals, and public health organizations must improve their ability to securely communicate this data to address potential emergencies such as infectious disease pandemics, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and suicide.
The U.S. federal government is responding to the need. In December, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed the Advancing Interoperability and Improving Prior Authorization Processes rule, which calls for payers to establish APIs to share patient health information-definitions or procedures that allow two pieces of software to interact with each other. The proposed solution, according to the rule, is to use FHIR to foster an API ecosystem based on open industry standards across the healthcare value chain.
FHIR enablers and converters are the future of seamless implementation of the FHIR standard. One of the biggest challenges in implementing the FHIR standard is the large number of different data formats, each with its own difficulties. For example, let’s take a look at the Health Level 7 (HL7) Version 2 data format.
Converting data from HL7 V2 to FHIR can be challenging due to differences in data models, message formats, and semantics between the two standards. Here are some common difficulties encountered during this conversion process and strategies to overcome them:
Overcoming these difficulties in converting HL7 v2 to FHIR requires careful planning, documentation, and collaboration between healthcare IT professionals, domain experts, and developers. It’s important to maintain data quality, accuracy, and semantic integrity throughout the conversion process.
Each data format will have its own set of difficulties in the conversion process. The simplest and most cost and time-effective solution is to use an FHIR converter to transform different types of data into the FHIR standard.
Sigma Software has extensive experience in the healthcare industry. Our solution is helping to move the FHIR standards community forward. We strive to make FHIR easier to implement.
We believe that using a cloud FHIR implementation can help you overcome some of the barriers associated with adopting FHIR and developing an FHIR-based service.
Need help with adopting FHIR and developing an FHIR-based service for your organization?
Contact our healthcare project setup team
The ideal cloud solution will allow you to deploy your environment quickly, customize it, and scale it as needed-all while limiting costs.
Benefits of Sigma Software’s Cloud-Native Solution Include:
Andrii's expertise primarily encompasses the Healthcare industry. Bolstered by extensive knowledge in the Information Security domain and ML/AI. Andrii Pastushok is committed to guaranteeing clients receive an exceptional product development experience.
Linkedin profileWhy do Healthcare Organizations Need FHIR?
The Benefits of FHIR for Healthcare Providers
Five Use Cases of FHIR in Healthcare
In April 2024, Sigma Software’s CEO Valery Krasovsky and IdeaSoft’s CEO Andrii Lazorenko attended Dominion, a leading cryptocurrency conference organized by D3 ...
Rapid launch has become a common practice, allowing businesses to test ideas in the early product stages and make improvements based on real-world feedback. Thi...
As time becomes increasingly connected to technology, it should come as no shock that healthcare has become a highly digitalized environment. Where once women’s...