HL7 Publishes Release 3 of FHIR Standard

Standards organization HL7 has published Release 3 of the its Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Standard for Trial Use (STU). The new version incorporates changes and enhancement requests received from implementation partners, including the Argonaut Project.

FHIR is a standards framework that leverages the latest Web standards and applies a tight focus on implementation. FHIR includes a RESTful application programming interface (API), which is an approach based on modern Internet conventions and widely used in other industries. FHIR can be applied to mobile devices, Web-based applications, cloud communications, and EHR data-sharing using modular components.

Here are some of the key changes made in FHIR Release 3:

• Added support for Clinical Decision Support and Clinical Quality Measures;

• Broadened functionality to cover key clinical workflows;

• Further development of Terminology Services, and support for Financial Management;

• Defined an RDF format, and how FHIR relates to Linked Data; and

• Incremental improvements and increased maturity of the RESTful API and conformance framework.

In addition to these changes to the base specification, Release 3 is published along with the U.S. Core Implementation Guide developed in association with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

“FHIR Release 3 is the culmination of a huge amount of work by the FHIR community, including hundreds of implementers, analysts and standards developers,” said Grahame Grieve, HL7 FHIR Product Director, in a prepared statement. “We believe it will offer the best platform yet for healthcare data exchange.”

HL7’s priority for the next release is to advance the key parts of the FHIR standard to a full ANSI-approved normative standard. The FHIR Maturity Model helps implementers understand how the various parts of the standard are advancing through the standards development lifecycle.