Pre-FHIR Interoperability and Clinical Decision Support Standards

Abstract

In the last chapter, we looked at the evolution of standards and examined the key health data standards. For use in actual patient care, standardized clinical data, typically along with other non-standardized data such as free text notes, must be packaged into a useful and usable form and sent using widely accepted data sharing standards and approaches. Many people feel that these standards and approaches will increasingly be FHIR APIs but FHIR is still being developed and the first ‘normative’ version isn’t expected until late 2018 so for some time into the future earlier standards will continue to be used. We will look at FHIR in the next chapter, while in this one we will look at the standards for packaging and sharing data that predate it.