COVID-19 has defined interoperability in true and understandable terms. Interoperability has many working parts, and all must work correctly together to be effective. Simple requirements include being able to identify patients uniquely everywhere. The aggregation of clinical data, imaging data, test data results, and travel requires precise identification of persons. We ust all speak the same language. We must have consistency and uniqueness in how we code the data including diseases, laboratory tests, race, gender, medications, and other clinical data. We must all collect the same data the same way. We must then make that data sharable with proper privacy, authentication, and authorization, prevalence, and governance. We need to identify what data we share, when and why. Finally, we must be able to transport the data in an interoperable fashion – the right data for the right patient to the right place at the right time.
That is the role HL7 International^® FHIR^® standard has the potential to serve. This presentation will introduce FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources) as a global solution to the interoperable sharing of data. FHIR is built on REST (Representational State Transfer), a pattern for using web technologies to manage data and APIs.