Health Level Seven International's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard continues to move forward, with a normative version in the works, according to an article at HealthData Management.
Chuck Jaffe, M.D., HL7's CEO, said during WEDI's national conference this week that the organization is currently working on refining the draft standard for information exchange.
He added that FHIR's new version will be "backward-compatible with all the existing trial use standards and will be stable enough for large vendors to incorporate into their platforms."
He also spoke about the Argonaut Project, according to HDM. The project is entering into its third stage, which will include short sprints to test interoperability of FHIR.
In addition, Stan Huff, M.D., chief medical informatics officer at Intermountain Healthcare, told the publication he sees such services being included on top of electronic medical record systems.
In fact, Geisinger Health System Chief Clinical Informatics Officer Alistair Erskine told FierceHealthIT in October that Geisinger has develop a number of applications that take advantage of FHIR to exchange information with multiple electronic health record systems, but he'd like to see more.
However, in an interview with FierceHealthIT in March, the CommonWell Health Alliance's Jitin Asnaani said FHIR is being "overbuilt in terms of what it can do."
"The reality is that if you look at the FHIR standard, it has some of the same issues current standards have. Everything is optional. That means you can send a legitimate FHIR-based piece of data, which has virtually nothing comprehensible in it, and it would be completely legitimate. So there's work that needs to be done by the entire community," he said.
To learn more:
- here's the HDM article