FHIR is on Fire

Ever since the announcement yesterday about Project Argonaut, FHIR has been getting some widespread coverage. Although, even before this important announcement, I was hearing a lot of people talk really optimistically about the potential of FHIR for healthcare. However, with Project Argonaut, you get all of these big name organizations on board as well:

  • athenahealth
  • Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
  • Cerner
  • Epic
  • Intermountain Healthcare
  • Mayo Clinic
  • MEDITECH
  • McKesson
  • Partners HealthCare System
  • SMART at the Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program
  • The Advisory Board Company

That’s quite a list of powerhouses that are investing money behind FHIR. I’m excited that the majority of major hospital EHR are represented in that list. Although, I do wonder if this is a lot of the same people who ruined CCDA. Let’s hope I’m wrong and they learned their lesson.

FHIR was also the topic of today’s #HITsm chat. Here are some of the tweets from the chat that caught my eye.


How’s that for optimism about the future of FHIR? Keith is deep in the trenches of health IT standards so he’s got a very informed opinion on what’s happening.


A very good sign since everyone I talk to seems to hate CCDA. They say that it’s bloated and really not usable.


I agree with Donald. The real question I have is whether FHIR will get us open APIs to the data we want. I need to investigate more to know the answer to that question.


I generally think this is true also, but not if it is a limited set of data. If you limit the data and don’t provide write back function, then there’s a real limit on what you can do with that data. Of course, you can start with some functionality and then build from there.


I’m still early on in my understanding of FHIR. I’m doing a whole series of posts on EMR and HIPAA around interoperability and the challenges associated with interoperability. You can be sure that FHIR will be a major part of my research and discussion. The above links look like a good place to start.

Please add your thoughts on FHIR in the comments as well.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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