Ever since the announcement yesterday about Project Argonaut, FHIR has been getting some widespread coverage. Although, even before this important announcement, I was hearing a lot of people talk really optimistically about the potential of FHIR for healthcare. However, with Project Argonaut, you get all of these big name organizations on board as well:
- athenahealth
- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- Cerner
- Epic
- Intermountain Healthcare
- Mayo Clinic
- MEDITECH
- McKesson
- Partners HealthCare System
- SMART at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program
- The Advisory Board Company
That’s quite a list of powerhouses that are investing money behind FHIR. I’m excited that the majority of major hospital EHR are represented in that list. Although, I do wonder if this is a lot of the same people who ruined CCDA. Let’s hope I’m wrong and they learned their lesson.
FHIR was also the topic of today’s #HITsm chat. Here are some of the tweets from the chat that caught my eye.
#FHIR is the answer!!! … I'm sorry, what was the question? #hitsm
— Keith W. Boone (@motorcycle_guy) December 5, 2014
How’s that for optimism about the future of FHIR? Keith is deep in the trenches of health IT standards so he’s got a very informed opinion on what’s happening.
Says the guy who wrote the book on C-CDA RT @motorcycle_guy: @shelleyvadams Take it from me, #FHIR is MUCH easier to implement #hitsm
— Chad Johnson (@OchoTex) December 5, 2014
A very good sign since everyone I talk to seems to hate CCDA. They say that it’s bloated and really not usable.
T3: Open APIs allow us to solve niche problems that aren't profitable for big guys to look at. That can be difficult today. #hitsm
— Donald F Lee III (@dflee30) December 5, 2014
I agree with Donald. The real question I have is whether FHIR will get us open APIs to the data we want. I need to investigate more to know the answer to that question.
T3: Anything that exposes info in a “standard” manner has got to be good in long haul #hitsm
— Steve Sisko (@ShimCode) December 5, 2014
I generally think this is true also, but not if it is a limited set of data. If you limit the data and don’t provide write back function, then there’s a real limit on what you can do with that data. Of course, you can start with some functionality and then build from there.
@ShimCode There are no better FHIR resources than @GrahameGrieve's blog. http://t.co/rOkX7ZSQYx #HITsm
— Chad Johnson (@OchoTex) December 5, 2014
I’m still early on in my understanding of FHIR. I’m doing a whole series of posts on EMR and HIPAA around interoperability and the challenges associated with interoperability. You can be sure that FHIR will be a major part of my research and discussion. The above links look like a good place to start.
Please add your thoughts on FHIR in the comments as well.
John,
Nice summary – for those who’d like to learn more about FHIR, besides many other sources of information this may prove to be useful: a “FHIR for Executives” whitepaper, available at http://www.ringholm.com/persist/FHIR_for_executives.pdf
TTYL,
-Rene