Get familiar with FHIR

🔥 Curious about the FHIR standard that everyone's talking about?

📚 Read on for a brief introduction, then try a brand-new learning path to get more in-depth knowledge!

The HL7® FHIR® standard has revolutionized the way healthcare developers take on the challenges of data interoperability. FHIR allows healthcare systems to exchange information seamlessly, and patient data can be consolidated in real time, regardless of where it's stored.

FHIR is a REST API that can handle both narrative and coded data, and it consists of resources, essentially building blocks for different data concepts such as patients or medications. FHIR profiles also provide context and define relationships between data elements, ensuring consistent descriptions across systems—so you can easily exchange information and relay the intended meaning.

To go beyond the basics, you can use FHIR Extensions to represent specific use cases that aren't covered by the standard. You can create extensions and publish them to publicly available URLs, so anyone receiving data with those extensions can discover what they mean.

And to make things easier, FHIR Implementation Guides are available. These guides contain profiled resources, including extensions, terminology bindings, and value sets specific to a particular use case. They provide documentation and examples of how to use them, making it a breeze to implement FHIR in your applications. Plus, they're machine-readable, so you can validate your FHIR applications and ensure they're on the right track.

Ready to dive into the world of FHIR? Head over to the InterSystems learning site to try the new learning path in the Online Learning catalog, Introduction to the FHIR Standard.