Ever since I’d heard so many good things about FHIR, I’ve been slowly trying to learn more about it, how it will be implemented, what challenges it faces, and what’s the pathway for FHIR to have widespread adoption.
So, it was no surprise that the Corepoint Health sessions on FHIR caught my eye and will be part of my HIMSS 2015. As part of that education they sent me their FHIR whitepaper which they’ll be handing out at their booth along with their sessions on FHIR. As with most things, the more I learn about FHIR, the more I realize I need to learn.
One example of this comes from the FHIR whitepaper linked above. It talks about defining resources for FHIR:
Resources are small, logically discrete units of exchange. Resources define behavior and meaning, have a known identity and location, are the smallest possible unit of transaction, and provide meaningful data that is of interest to healthcare. The plan is to limit resources to 100 to 150 in total. They are sometimes compared to an HL7 V2 segment.
The resources can be extended and adapted to provide a more manageable solution to the healthcare demand for optionality and customization.
Source: Corepoint Health
This section reminded me of a comment Greg Meyer tweeted during an #HITsm chat about FHIR’s biggest challenge being to define profiles. When he said, that I made a note to myself to learn more about what made up profiles. What Greg called profiles, it seems Corepoint Health is calling resources. They seem to be the same thing. This chart from the whitepaper does a great job summarizing why creating these resources (or profiles if you prefer) is so challenging:
Source: Corepoint Health
I still have a lot more to learn about FHIR, but it seems like it does have really good founding principles. We’ll see if the powers that be can keep it pure or try and corrupt and modify its core principles. Not to mention take it and make it so complex that it’s not usable. I’ll be learning more about FHIR at HIMSS and I’ll be sure to report back. Until then, this FHIR whitepaper provides a pretty good historical overview of FHIR versus the other healthcare IT standards.
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[…] HIMSS, I posted about my work to understand FHIR. There’s some great information in that post as I progress in my understanding of FHIR (HL7’s […]