⏯️ 1. FHIR facts for developers
Key facts about HL7® FHIR®
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7® FHIR®)1 is an HL7® (HL7® International)1 standard for exchanging medical information digitally2.
It was created by Graham Grieve in 2011 to improve healthcare data sharing.
HL7® FHIR®1 is easy to implement because it uses familiar technologies like JSON, XML, and RESTful API.
HL7® FHIR®1 is made up of resources. Resources are data structures that encapsulate all relevant information about a specific concept. Examples for exisiting resources are patient, medication, condition or practitioner.
HL7® FHIR®1 resources are built to handle 80% of the most relevant use cases. This is known as the “80% rule”.
Adjusting a resource is called profiling. The result is a profile.
You can add new elements via extensions. This is part of profiling and a central feature in FHIR.
Once you have your profiles ready, you can use them to capture medical information and exchange it with other systems.
There are 5 exchange paradigms in HL7® FHIR®1, and the most widely used is the HL7® FHIR®1 Restful API that uses a dedicated HL7® FHIR®1 server.