There has been much enthusiasm in the health IT industry regarding the health data standard that HL7 International is working on, HL7 FHIR, which is now a DSTU (draft standard for trial use). Everyone involved with health data – EHR vendors, interoperability vendors, medical app developers, “big data” proponents and hospital CIOs, to name a few – have high hopes that FHIR can be the golden ticket that leads to true health care interoperability.
Most of the enthusiasm is around the technologies being utilized in the standard including RESTful web services, JSON encoding, and granular data content called resources.
Technology-Empowered FHIR Data
RESTful web services, in particular, is a technology that has been strongly embraced by other industries and has the potential to be leveraged for engaging patients by connecting mobile technologies with their provider’s EHR system. This advancement represents a huge step toward building a patient-centered health care system.
Over the last decade, the healthcare industry has utilized SOAP-based web services to transfer documents. Most programmers today, if given their choice, would likely lean towards RESTful web services, preferably with data encoded in the JSON format. It is a better choice for mobile applications independent of whether the client device technology is iOS, Android, Windows, or even Mobile Web. Most social media sites today, such as Twitter and Facebook, publish RESTful APIs for connectivity.
This preference towards RESTful web services is based on some of the advantages that REST has over SOAP:
