FHIR and the Future of Healthcare Interoperability

What FHIR changes, what it does not, and how it coexists with HL7 v2.

FHIR — Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources — is a standard for exchanging healthcare data over web APIs. It models information as resources (Patient, Encounter, Observation, MedicationRequest and around 150 others), each with defined fields and stable identifiers, exchanged as JSON over REST.

What it changes

Ordinary web and mobile developers can build against healthcare data without specialist middleware. Data becomes queryable on demand rather than pushed in batches. Patient-facing apps, partner APIs, analytics feeds and regulatory access all get much easier.

What it does not change (yet)

Most hospitals still run their critical internal flows — admissions, orders, results — over HL7 v2 interfaces that work reliably. FHIR is added at the edges first and expands inward over years.

Where the effort goes

Profiling (constraining resources to your use case), terminology (mapping local codes to LOINC, SNOMED CT, RxNorm), patient identity matching, and authorization (SMART on FHIR scopes and consent). Budget for these from the start.

In an OpenEMR environment

OpenEMR supports FHIR, and a real integration typically involves mapping, an authorization model, and a bridge to existing HL7 v2 traffic. See OpenEMR FHIR Integration.

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