Microsoft announced the release of an open source project on GitHub from Microsoft Healthcare: FHIR Server for Azure. FHIR Server for Azure empowers developers with software that fully supports exchange and management of data in the cloud via the FHIR specification.
FHIR Server for Azure 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). Developers can save time when it’s required to integrate a FHIR server into an application or use it as a foundation to customize a unique FHIR service.
Microsoft 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.
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is rapidly gaining support in the healthcare community as the next generation standards framework for interoperability, and it’s clear why. FHIR provides a simpler, easier-to-learn, and pragmatic framework. Building on the shared experience of healthcare standards communities, FHIR offers an extensible data model and a REST API to simplify the implementation and interoperability of health data.
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. Supporting the FHIR standard and investing in open source to enable FHIR is core to that commitment.
Microsoft wants to make it easier and more secure for organizations working with healthcare data. They are starting with FHIR Server for Azure, and plan to enable a broad set of core services in the Microsoft Cloud to support healthcare interoperability standards like FHIR.
In almost every facet of healthcare, the ambition to create and deliver AI exceeds the tools available to deliver it. FHIR Server for Azure provides a foundation to address that problem. Working with data in the FHIR format, 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.
