A way of connecting computers in healthcare passed another milestone toward widespread use this week as two healthcare interoperability advocates reached an accord over the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard.
The two groups are Health Level Seven International, which for 29 years has been developing standards for health information exchange, including the fast-spreading FHIR (pronounced “fire”) and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, which has helped promote and test interoperability of HIT systems since 1998.
Several major health IT developers, including Athenahealth, Cerner, Epic, McKesson and Meditech, have been working since 2014 with FHIR-based technology as a tool to build interfaces with other developers' products to move data in and out of their systems.
HL7, based out of Ann Arbor, Mich.,-based developer and IHE, out of Oak Brook, IL., have collaborated in ways "essential to advancing interoperability in health IT," said Dr. Michael McCoy, board co-chair of IHE in a news release.
For example, HL7's interoperability standards have been used as part of IHE-developed implementation “profiles” to achieve interoperability for a specific use. Developers' implementations of these profiles are tested at IHE hosted “connectathons” attended by hundreds of software engineers each year.
The new joint statement of understanding “provides for improved communication and coordination of schedules and projects to help expedite the development and adoption of (FHIR),” according to the release.
“We've recognized a need to impart more clarity about our mutual roles for the community and the marketplace,” said HL7 CEO Dr. Charles Jaffe. He added that HL7 had introduced new processes, like FHIR, that overlap with IHE.
"Therefore, we will seek to clarify how each organization uses terms such as profile and connectathon, and most importantly, the respective roles our organizations play,” he said.
