HL7 International Publishes FHIR(R) Release 3

HL7 Publishes FHIR® Release 3
Standard continues to expand and adapt to broad industry feedback

Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA – March 22, 2017 – Health Level Seven® International (HL7®), the global authority for interoperability in healthcare information technology with affiliates in 35 countries, today announced that it has published Release 3 of the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) Standard for Trial Use (STU). The new version is the culmination of 18 months of extensive work to incorporate changes and enhancement requests received from implementation partners across the world, including the Argonaut Project.

HL7’s FHIR is a next generation standards framework that leverages the latest web standards and applies a tight focus on implementation. FHIR includes a RESTful API, which is an approach based on modern internet conventions and widely used in other industries. The standard represents a significant advance in accessing and delivering data while offering enormous flexibility and ease of development. For patients and providers, its versatility can be applied to mobile devices, web-based applications, cloud communications, and EHR data-sharing using modular components. As demonstrated most recently at the FHIR Applications Roundtable at Duke University and HIMSS17, FHIR is already widely used in hundreds of applications across the globe for the benefit of providers, patients and payers.

The list of updates and changes made to FHIR Release 3 is extensive – thousands of changes have been made in response to implementation experience and quality review processes. Some of the key changes:

• Added support for Clinical Decision Support and Clinical Quality Measures
• Broadened functionality to cover key clinical workflows
• Further development of Terminology Services, and support for Financial Management
• Defined an RDF format, and how FHIR relates to Linked Data
• Incremental improvements and increased maturity of the RESTful API and conformance framework

In addition to these changes to the base specification, Release 3 is published along with the US Core Implementation Guide , a US-realm specific implementation guide developed in association with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).

“FHIR Release 3 is the culmination of a huge amount of work by the FHIR community, including hundreds of implementers, analysts and standards developers. We believe it will offer the best platform yet for healthcare data exchange,” said Grahame Grieve, HL7 FHIR Product Director.

The FHIR specification is expected to continue to evolve in the future as it responds to the interoperability needs of the robust FHIR implementation community. HL7’s priority for the next release is to advance the key parts of the FHIR standard to a full ANSI-approved normative standard. The FHIR Maturity Model helps implementers understand how the various parts of the standard are advancing through the standards development life-cycle.

For more information on HL7’s FHIR and to download the standard, please visit: www.HL7.org/FHIR.

Link to Press Release

On behalf of HL7 Canada, congratulations to the countless number of volunteers who contributed to this release!
Melva Peters
HL7 Canada Chair