FHIRbased

FHIRbased is an adjective used to describe software, services, or systems that implement the HL7 FHIR standard for exchanging healthcare information. A FHIRbased solution typically models data as FHIR resources such as Patient, Observation, Condition, MedicationRequest, and Encounter, and exposes them through a RESTful API. Data can be exchanged in JSON or XML formats, using standard operations like read, search, create, update, and delete, enabling interoperable access across applications and organizations.

FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, was developed by HL7 as a modern, web-friendly successor to older HL7 standards. FHIR emphasizes modular resources, reuse through profiles and implementation guides, and ease of use with modern web technologies, including OAuth 2.0 for authorization and OpenID Connect for identity. The FHIR specification is periodically updated; major releases include R4 (Stability) and R5 (Continuity).

Common use cases for FHIRbased systems include electronic health record (EHR) integration, patient-facing apps that access health data, health information exchange between providers, clinical decision support, and research data aggregation. In practice, FHIRbased solutions may implement conformance statements and profiles to meet local requirements and privacy laws.

Challenges include varying levels of maturity across vendors, the proliferation of implementation guides, versioning and backward compatibility, data quality, and security/privacy concerns in cross-institution sharing. Despite these challenges, FHIRbased approaches are widely adopted for enabling interoperable health data exchange and patient access.