Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)

See the following -

Aligning with the Standards Development Community: The New Cycle for Standards Version Advancement Process

As part of ONC’s ongoing charge to coordinate across federal and industry stakeholders, we determined it was necessary to adjust our Standards Version Advancement Process (SVAP) timeline. Although it may seem like this process has been around for a while, it’s still brand new and we’ve been looking at ways to optimize how the process aligns with other standards development work in the community. The changes we’ve made will help ensure timely publication of implementation specifications central to our cadence for new versions of USCDI.

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Open Source Solutions for Immunization Tracking and COVID-19

The United States is starting to emerge from a nation-wide shut down imposed to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Most states are starting to reopen, and while higher education will likely stay largely remote this fall, primary and secondary schools are expected to reopen as the economy tries to get back on its feet. As both children and adults begin to spend more time together again, it is important to understand the impact that COVID-19 is having on current immunization practices and services, and how open source software is being leveraged to keep the population safe.

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2017 Emerges as Pivotal Year for FHIR Interoperability Standard

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | January 5, 2017

Health Level Seven International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application programming interface is moving closer to becoming a mature standard, with the “normative” version slated for release sometime in 2017. Standards are widely perceived as providing the greatest potential for achieving national health IT interoperability in the near future. In particular, FHIR is seen by industry stakeholders as a promising solution to the complex interoperability challenges that are confronting healthcare organizations...

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6 Reasons To Plan Architecture For Interoperability

John Loonsk | Government Health IT | September 23, 2014

Nearly $26 billion spent, and the U.S. healthcare industry is still asking why information doesn’t move more easily between electronic health records.  That’s a loaded question, of course, and suggesting a ten-year timeframe or arguing that there is progress if you look hard enough just doesn’t answer it...

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A New Pothole on the Health Interoperability Superhighway

Adrian Gropper | The Health Care Blog | August 15, 2017

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act...

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A Web Services Approach to Public Health Clinical Decision Support

David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | October 22, 2016

Although it is still early days, I am increasingly convinced that the movement to bring a web services approach to healthcare is real. Every week brings announcements of new efforts to create modules that do one thing well and that providers could subscribe to from within their EHR. This approach makes so much more sense than each provider working with its software vendor to recreate the wheel.This is especially appealing in the realm of clinical decision support (CDS), in which knowledge management is so time-consuming and difficult for provider organizations...

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AEGIS Announces Touchstone for HL7 FHIR Interoperability Testing

Press Release | AEGIS.net | November 12, 2015

AEGIS.net, Inc. (AEGIS)...introduces the Touchstone Project - a next generation cloud-based Testing Platform which applies Conformance and Interoperability testing in a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) integrated ecosystem.  As organizations new to the Health Level Seven® (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) specification begin to explore and evaluate this new HL7® standard and start projects with a goal of being an early adopter, AEGIS' Touchstone Test Platform will guide those implementations towards a high degree of conformance and interoperability in a continuous model.

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AMIA’s Doug Fridsma: Time for the Feds to Truly Open Up Patient Records to Fully Interoperable Data Use

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | June 13, 2016

Access to information and the ability to integrate and use information has changed how individuals book travel, find information about prices and products, and compare and review services. Information can empower individuals, but health care has lagged behind other fields. It is unconscionable that in 2016 most patients are unable to obtain their entire medical record unless they print it out. While progress has been made in the last several years to support patients’ access to their information through various electronic means, such as Blue Button and patient portals, this is not sufficient to make patients first-order participants in their care, their health and their research efforts...

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apps.health Platform Adopts FHIR to Advance Digital Health Interoperability for Open Source EMRs

Press Release | WELL Health Technologies Corp. | April 12, 2021

WELL Health Technologies Corp...is pleased to announce its apps.health marketplace and WELL EMR Group have launched an API that supports the key industry interoperability standard known as FHIR. FHIR is an emerging standard for exchanging healthcare data which has been broadly adopted in the U.S. and is being implemented in many other countries including Canada.  In addition, major consumer and cloud technology companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have publicly committed to the FHIR standard and have incorporated FHIR capabilities into their web service offerings.

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Beth Israel's CareKit App Leverages FHIR for Patient Engagement

The following is a guest blog post from Seth Berkowitz, MD, who authors many of the innovative apps in the BIDMC Crowdsourcing program: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has developed BIDMC@home, a new app for engaging patients using Apple’s CareKit and ResearchKit frameworks and the HealthKit API. The app provides a flexible framework to help patients manage their health from home, as directed by their physicians. The app will be piloted in several specific patient populations and will eventually be offered to BIDMC’s entire network of over 250,000 patients...

Better Tech Is Here for Healthcare

Brandt Welker | EMR & HIPAA | September 13, 2017

Better technology is out there serving other industries … and it can be applied in healthcare. Technology should ease administrative loads and put clinicians back in front of patients! I’ve talked about some of this previously and how we keep clinicians involved in our design process. When it came to building an entirely new EHR, the driving force behind our team researching and adopting new technologies was to imagine a clean slate...

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Building an Open Medical Records System for the Developing World

How do you introduce a woman whose very life is the epitome of humanitarian efficacy? Judy Gichoya is a Kenyan medical doctor specializing in radiology and an experienced programmer who's accelerating the growth of OpenMRS. According to its website, "OpenMRS is a software platform and a reference application which enables design of a customized medical records system with no programming knowledge." Judy first got interested in computers in high school, prior to entering medical school she learned to program at a technical college and through online resources on the internet...

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Can Open Source EHRs Offer a New Path for Health IT Usability?

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | March 28, 2017

In an article published in JMIR Medical Informatics, researchers from the University of California-Davis decided to explore the small but intriguing world of open source EHRs, which may fit very neatly into the growing interest in application programming interfaces, FHIR, and other open data standards that encourage customized mix-and-match health IT development without the historical pitfalls of proprietary systems. Using data from 2014, the researchers identified 54 open source projects that met the HHS definition of an electronic health record.  At the time, four of those packages had achieved Certified EHR Technology status from the ONC.

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Can SMART on FHIR Solve mHealth’s Medication Management Challenges?

Staff Writer | mHealth Intelligence | January 18, 2017

An agreement to promote interoperability between three of the largest and most competitive EHR platforms has set the stage for a breakthrough in mHealth medication management. Using the SMART on FHIR app platform, providers will be able to access a patient’s entire medication history no matter where that data is stored. While this opens the door to better care management and coordination, it also gives patients the mHealth tools to manage their own care and collaborate with their doctors...

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Cerner Clients Test SMART on FHIR Apps Within EHR

Press Release | Cerner | October 8, 2015

Cerner...has unveiled a production version of HL7's FHIR® standard that is being tested in the Cerner Millennium® electronic health record (EHR). "This next-generation standards framework enables health care organizations to utilize Cerner's open platform, which is designed to enable third-party innovators to advance care delivery and improve interoperability capabilities with other FHIR-compliant EHR systems," said Dr. David McCallie, senior vice president, medical informatics at Cerner. "This integrated approach will provide clinicians access to 'pluggable apps' directly within their workflows that are designed to expand and transform the way care is delivered."

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