Is health IT about to catch FHIR?

The Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR, has been anything but fast in terms of adoption. It has been smoldering on the edges since version 1 draft standard 2 was introduced in 2015, but there are signs that version 2 is about to break out into a heat wave.

Ok enough of the incendiary metaphors, in a recent blog post on the HealthIT.gov blog, Steven Posnack and Wes Barker make a case for FHIR Release 2 becoming a widely adopted standard. Using CMS and ONC data, the pair analyzed how many hospitals and clinicians are using FHIR to meet 2015 Edition certification requirements. Their analysis shows that 82 percent of hospitals and 64 percent of clinicians report using FHIR Release 2.

Despite these numbers, the authors caution that industry-wide, much work remains from standards development to implementation.

Before you leap into FHIR, however, you may also want to read PARCA founder Herman Oosterwijk ’s OTech blog post "Should I Jump Into the FHIR right now?"