Introduction

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a standard in health care for exchanging clinical information electronically. It was developed by the health care IT standards body- Health Level Seven International (HL7). The Health Level Seven International is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) –accredited organization. It is a not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to coming up with a framework and standards for sharing, exchange, retrieval and integration of electronic health information.

By incorporating the HL7 experiences with the previous v2 and v3 models, FHIR seeks to facilitate exchange of health care data elements with medics, research IT systems, other health care vendors & providers as well as with other metadata systems on a wide array of electronic devises. It was necessary to develop accessible health care standards that can be broadly-supported by a wide variety of devices (cell phones, tablets and computers), in the modern age of rapid technological change. FHIR is more superior as compared to the previous HL7v2 and v3 standards that were more complex, not royalty free and less familiar thereby making them more expensive and reducing their adoption.

The main challenge for healthcare standards at the present moment concerns how to handle variability that is brought about by different healthcare processes. As more options and fields are added to the specification, it ends up becoming more complex and gradually adding the costs involved. The alternative to this is to rely on custom extensions, but often this result in other implementation problems.

The FHIR standard is the solution to this as it describes a simple framework for adapting and extending the existing resources. It does not matter how a system is developed, it can readily read these extensions. With this standard also, extension definitions can be recovered via the same structure as retrieving other resources. With this also, each resource conveys a readable text representation using html as a reserve expression option for clinical security. This is crucial in cases of complicated clinical data whereby systems take a simple document or textual based approach.