HL7 FHIR
Also known as: FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources
A healthcare data exchange standard from HL7 that defines discrete clinical data resources and a web API for accessing them.
FHIR defines clinical concepts such as Patient, Observation, Medication, and Encounter as discrete resources retrievable over a standard web API. It is the current basis for most new healthcare integration work and is required for certain certified electronic health record capabilities in the United States.
For a vendor, FHIR support is close to a baseline expectation for any product that needs clinical data.
FHIR support is not a single capability and claiming it flatly tells a buyer almost nothing. The questions that matter are which resources, which version, read or write, and whether access is through the EHR vendor’s app program, which carries its own review, fees, and timeline.
Many integration disappointments trace to a vendor that genuinely supported FHIR and a buyer who assumed that meant the specific data flow they needed was available.