A long time ago our gadgets learned to monitor our health and give a signal about a problem if there is any. Synchronization of gadget signals and data on patients' physical history is our immediate future that is intended to simplify the diagnostics and monitoring of changes in the condition of clinics' care recipients.
Currently, many clinics are not only unable to get information from the patient's gadgets but also have information systems of doubtful suitability for use in the near future.
Top comments (2)
I have used FHIR for many years including in large production applications/platforms. There is a steep learning curve and the documentation can be difficult to navigate but it has improved significantly over time and their are open source clients and sample apps.
If you compare FHIR to previous formats like HL7 V2, FHIR is the clear choice. It's important to consider FHIR in the context of healthcare IT where many systems are still primarily written in languages from the 60's and the default integration option is HL7 V2. By the way HL7 V2 is widely customized, so even using that framework requires customization for every implementation.
Another thing that is frequently forgotten, is that previous methods require a subscriber pattern, with every integrated application maintaining their own shadow copy of the patient data. Events are processed and the data is updated, hopefully to match the source. FHIR is primarily a query based standard. So apps don't need to store the data at all and its always up to date.
FHIR changes the ecosystem from a closed industry with proprietary and costly formats to one with standards that are free and open source. Even Apple uses FHIR to integrate their Health app with health systems, which wouldn't have been possible previously without hundreds of custom integrations and significant data privacy concerns.
As someone who tried implementing FHIR, I would say it has a long way to go before it becomes a standard. The lack of documentation, examples of how to map own data to FHIR turned me off from it.