FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a set of standards for exchanging healthcare information electronically that is gaining momentum worldwide and it is also relevant to New Zealand. The New Zealand Ministry of Health has identified FHIR as a key standard for enabling interoperability across the healthcare system. This will enable healthcare providers to easily share and access patient information, ultimately improving patient care and reducing costs.
In New Zealand, the use of electronic health records (EHRs) is increasing, but these systems often operate in isolation, making it difficult for healthcare providers to access and share information. FHIR can help address this problem by providing a common standard for sharing information between systems. This will enable healthcare providers to have access to a patient’s complete health history, which improves care coordination and can prevent costly medical errors.
Furthermore, with the increasing trend of telehealth and remote consultation in New Zealand, FHIR has the potential to enable new use cases such as, mobile health apps that can access patient health data and improve the patient experience by giving them more control over their health information and making it more accessible.
Overall, FHIR is a promising new standard that has the potential to revolutionize the way healthcare organizations in New Zealand share and access information. With its flexibility, simple data model, and RESTful architecture, FHIR is well-positioned to become the standard for healthcare information exchange in New Zealand in the future.
At a technical level we have for many years endorsed the FHIR® standard for exchanging health data via RESTful APIs and will invest in tools that allow projects to build, maintain and publish nationally agreed FHIR artefacts.](https://www.hl7.org/fhir/)
We will use the FHIR R4 International Patient Summary Implementation Guide and related specifications as starting points for national health information platform work to set API standards for medicines, allergies and adverse reactions, health conditions, immunisations, procedures, medical devices, diagnostics, vital signs, functional status, care plans, advance directives and risk factors. By following international standards, we ensure that NZ-built solutions are compatible with the popular global consumer health platforms.
We will support a model-driven approach to software development by publishing technology-neutral data set specifications that can be fed into the FHIR resource design process. This approach allows other toolchains and methodologies such as openEHR to be used in software development.
Projects for the NHI and HPI API changes, National Immunisation Register (NIR) replacement and the national health information platform will develop the FHIR profiles and implementation guides they need and publish them via a national registry.
We will work with industry partners to grow the pool of certified FHIR developers, using the available HL7 International courses.
If it could (I don’t think that it can at all BTW), it would be just what we need to trawl an individual patient’s medical records and produce a truly useful summary document (with links).
And it’s nice to see HealthOne has joined FHIR community with a FHIR store for data and FHIR API’s allowing 300,000 accesses monthly from my health care colleagues in the South Island enabling an equal number of South Island patients to achieve safer more efficient more effective healthcare.
