In early January, Health Level Seven International, a nonprofit standards organization, announced the fourth release of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard.

Charles Jaffe, CEO at HL7, described the new version of the FHIR standard as having achieved a "critical milestone." But an executive at Redox, a healthcare data exchange company using the FHIR standard and an organizational member of HL7, said the healthcare community shouldn't see this as an interoperability fix.

Niko Skievaski, co-founder and president of Redox, said the FHIR standard is a tool and not a solution. He believes the standard has been overhyped and that the problem of interoperability is too big for the standard to solve.

A look at FHIR R4 Jaffe said the biggest news for FHIR R4 is that some characteristics have reached "normative" status, a designation by the American National Standards Institute to indicate a level of stability and maturity. The newly normative characteristics, described as FHIR's "base platform" in a press release, are also backward compatible, which means they will work in future versions of the standard. FHIR R4 is another attempt at getting the healthcare community closer to true interoperability, which Jaffe said not only means receiving data but understanding it and being able to reuse it. FHIR is not the solution to interoperability. It is a tool and that tool needs to get better and refined. Niko Skievaskipresident, Redox "HL7 FHIR R4 is a beginning," he said in a statement when news of FHIR R4 was announced. "It is the legacy of eight years of innovation and collaboration among a community of thousands around the world. It is a commitment from HL7 to create a platform from which interoperability can someday emerge. It is a promise to provide reusable data across the continuum of biomedical research, patient care, and population health." There are still "enormous hurdles" to overcome – technically, as well as culturally, Jaffe said. But he pointed to FHIR standard's API, a software architecture that enables computers to talk to each other, and its ease of use for programmers as two notable features that push the interoperable envelope. "There are two things FHIR achieves," he said. "One is there's a set of vocabulary that we all agreed what it meant. And two, there are capabilities for exchanging information that have never been achieved prior to this in healthcare."