Microsoft Healthcare has announced the release of an open source project, FHIR Server for Azure, to offer developers access to software that supports the exchange and management of data in the cloud via the FHIR specification.
FHIR Server for Azure on GitHub provides support infrastructure for immediate provisioning in the cloud, including mapping to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), and the ability to enable role-based access controls (RBAC), the company said. Developers can save time when they need to integrate a FHIR server into an application or use it as a foundation to customize a unique FHIR service.
In a blog post, Heather Jordan Cartwright, general manager of Microsoft Healthcare, said the company “is contributing this open source project to make it easier for all organizations working with healthcare data to leverage the power of the cloud for clinical data processing and machine learning workloads.”
In August 2018, Microsoft joined with Amazon, Google, IBM and other companies in a commitment to remove barriers for the adoption of technologies that support healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI and especially FHIR.
Among the points the companies agreed to was: “We understand that achieving frictionless health data exchange is an ongoing process, and we commit to actively engaging among open source and open standards communities for the development of healthcare standards, and conformity assessment to foster agility to account for the accelerated pace of innovation.”
As an example of how FHIR Server for Azure will work, Microsoft said developers can use the server to quickly ingest and manage FHIR datasets in a cloud environment, track and manage data access, and begin to normalize data for machine-learning workloads.
In August, Josh Mandel, chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, noted that the company had added support for FHIR to the Dynamics Business Application Platform through the Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator, and developed an open source Azure Security and Compliance Blueprint for Health Data and AI for deploying a FHIR-enabled, HIPAA/HITRUST environment in Azure.
