HL7 FHIR is now 9 years old. It’s emergence as a critical path toward interoperability has been a challenging process. With the creation of the Argonaut Project in the fall of 2014, by EHR vendors and academic medical centers, a private-sector force drove both the development and implementation of FHIR. Over the ensuing years, the development of FHIR was paralleled by a growing international implementation community.

Within a year, the Office of the National Coordinator had established the certification requirement for open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The real turning point came in early 2018, when Apple announced that FHIR had been imbedded into the IOS operating system and included 12 pilot academic health systems. Today, that number has grown to more than 500 hospitals and health systems.

At the same time, a dozen large private-sector payers announced the creation of the Da Vinci Project, which would leverage FHIR to enable Value Based Care. Soon thereafter, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced their participation. After a measured start, FHIR implementation guides have been balloted for several critical functions toward their ambitious goals. In 2019, Da Vinci will see the publication of as many as 7 more guides.

In December of 2018, HL7 published the first normative edition of FHIR, now recognized as Release 4 (R4). This release promised the implementation community a new level of stability and, for the first time, introduced true backward compatibility.

Perhaps the most remarkable acceleration of FHIR implementation came this February with the Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM), by both CMS and ONC, which established multiple requirements for FHIR in both clinical care and the Medicare/Medicaid transaction landscape.

This workshop will provide the historical perspective of HL7 FHIR, the technical implementations that have spurred wide-spread adoption, the implications of the NPRM as the comment period closes, and the future roadmaps of Argonaut, Da Vinci, and the FHIR development community. This includes the release of CDS Hooks, for clinical decision support and more, and the publication of Bulk Data on FHIR, which provides for the transmission of large data cohorts for clinical research, population health, translational science, and genomic integration into EHR platforms.

The interactive session will be geared to the rapidly growing communities of FHIR implementers. No technical expertise in FHIR development or implementation will be required.