Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR (pronounced “fire”), is a widely used programming interface used to represent and exchange health information maintained by a standards development organization called HL7, or Health Level Seven International. It makes the exchange of patient data easier to communicate among different health systems. It also allows for care teams to connect patients to community resources, streamlines reimbursement and decreases manual tasks such as re-entering data into spreadsheets.
Deeper dive
The primary goal of FHIR is to enable seamless interoperability between different health care systems, allowing patients, providers and organizations to share critical health information. FHIR resources represent discrete data elements like patient records, medications or diagnostic reports that can be retrieved, updated or manipulated individually. Started in 2012, it has rapidly evolved, and became the backbone of health care data exchange initiatives in the U.S. and countries such as Brazil and Israel.
FHIR was initially designed for clinical data but is increasingly being used to share screening data about housing, food insecurity and transportation needs. These social drivers of health can impact health outcomes and costs but there hadn’t been a way to exchange that information.