Lab FHIR resources are sought after as the industry-wide adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems has increased the demand for connectivity between EHRs and Laboratory Information Systems (LIS). This interface is urgently needed in many practices to perform the electronic ordering of tests and results reporting and to meet the “meaningful use” regulatory requirements.
With hundreds of EHR vendors in the market, the task of finding an appropriate interface developer can be daunting for lab administrators and CIOs. All the interfaces developed must meet the current HIPAA compliance requirements, comply with interoperability standards like C-CDA and HL7 FHIR, and work seamlessly with the existing EHR. That’s where the new lab FHIR resources included in the fourth iteration of the FHIR standard offer a lot of helpful capabilities.
FHIR Release 4 Enhances Data Sharing
The HL7 FHIR release 4 has created a lot of excitement for two reasons. First, healthcare data may be represented just once in FHIR and used without any modifications in multiple data-sharing scenarios such as web services, REST, HL7 documents. or messages.
This is because FHIR combines the meaning of your data with the actual data. So. through FHIR, it’s possible to send lab readings from one system as an HL7 message and send them to an EHR as a discharge summary without doing any data transformation.
The second reason is that FHIR is a modern interoperability standard built on the Web 2.0 technology used on social media, search, e-commerce, and a host of online services used daily.
FHIR Uses Off-the-Shelf Programming APIs
The FHIR 4 standard is on par with modern trends in software development, and it works like the modern programming APIs that new developers are learning to use today. So, interfaces can be built within a few days if an LIS and EHR comply with the latest FHIR standard. For example, developers or vendors working with a lab FHIR API will need to implement few resources including:
- Organization
- Patient
- Practitioner
- Diagnostic Order
- Diagnostic Report
- Encounter
- Observation
FHIR extensions may be used to express all the business rules required in the interface.
FHIR 4 Improves Health IT Interoperability
While using FHIR alone cannot solve all the problems of interoperability in the health sector, it’s more functional and flexible than all the other standards in use. FHIR allows for the reading and writing of data, and it supports the development of pluggable apps like those that can be downloaded from Google Play or Apple App stores.
Lab FHIR Can Improve Patient Care
If an EHR, Health Information Exchange (HIE), or any data source uses FHIR, apps that support this standard can retrieve data and turn it into actionable formats and presentations to improve patient care. That’s why charts, graphs, and views that used to cost developers a lot of time and effort to create can now be created with FHIR-compliant apps embedded into the EHR.
Discover More About Using Lab FHIR Resources to Connect Your LIS and EHR
Contact us at Lifepoint Informatics at 877.522.8378 today for a free consultation. We develop custom medical applications for various aspects of healthcare practice. We’ve been doing this since 1999, and we have over 20,000 completed projects.