Introducing FHIR

Interoperability between healthcare organizations has been like the search for the holy grail. The HL7 organization has been around since 1987 and has tackled the task of establishing standards for sharing healthcare information. There have been many levels of maturity of the standard over the years, with the most prominent being HL7v2.

Version 2 is an exchange of data that is delimited with pipes. Unfortunately, at the time, this method was too lenient, and some fields were left up to the provider to declare. These fields then created issues for consumers because they didn't have the consistency needed to receive the same type of file from different sources. Fields were of different types and values. Version 3 was introduced by HL7 to improve the data exchange quality by using XML and XML schemas. The adoption of version 3 was not as successful as they had hoped. XML schemas were difficult to digest and made implementations complicated. The goal was still...