Cache With FHIR

Great summary Tom. The only thing I would add is that FHIR actually supports several paradigms:

• REST - As mentioned by Tom, allows you to retrieve or interact with one or multiple "FHIR resources". This allows you to work with smaller amounts of data (just what you need) instead of only allowing you to retrieve a large amount of data (for example, a CDA document). This is the most common and one of the greatest benefits of FHIR in our world where mobile devices may not want to get ALL data, but just what it needs at that time.
• Document - You can still retrieve or interact with a large document of data such as a Patient Summary, similar to CDA.
• Messages - This allows you to retrieve or interact with a message of data - FHIR resources bundled and includes an event that triggered it.
• Services - This one is a bit more "vague" but it allows you to interact with FHIR data using a service-oriented model using custom code.

All are supported in HealthShare (both Health Connect and Information Exchange). In Health Connect, you will likely either consume FHIR and transform it to some other type, or consume some other type of data (CDA, HL7v2, etc.) and transform it to FHIR. In Information Exchange, an Edge Gateway can consume FHIR data as well to be used like any other data in the exchange.