Chris Royle Dedalus talks FHIR HL7 and shares his A-Z series

After completing my series of posts on LinkedIn on HL7 FHIR I need to explain why I am so passionate about it as a standard and why I think it is fundamental to the way we think about healthcare interoperability going forward.

The use of HL7 messaging within hospitals has been around since the late 1970s and was used for sending ADT data from the PAS to the lab (amongst others). Systems were far simpler than they are today.

They recorded what had happened and informed other systems (inside the hospital) of where patients were. There were no mobile apps, no mobile phones, limited clinical decision support, no patient engagement – and no web applications.

Today we live in a more complex world where patients have their own devices tracking every step they take, their weight, blood pressure, heart rate every hour of the day. There are more and more network connected devices inside the hospital – giving us a view of a patient in real time.

Most patients want to share their health data with their doctor to improve the treatment they receive – and they expect that this information is shared in a timely manner.

The wealth of data being captured about an individual is immense – the information from a patient’s general practitioner, each of the clinicians in their care team, and patients themselves.

We need a way of sharing this information in an open standardised way and FHIR provides this. It is open, extensible and standard, and more importantly it is easy to understand. It uses technologies that app developers can understand – like REST, JSON, and XML making it easy to adopt. Implementers can build their own FHIR servers and HL7 to FHIR converters, but why would you? A better approach is to implement a platform which is already FHIR enabled allowing you to quickly innovate at the edge of your traditional applications.

Is your PAS application FHIR enabled? It doesn’t matter you can get a platform that transforms your HL7 messages into FHIR in real-time and innovate without needing to upgrade. Access to this data is just one piece of the puzzle. You need a platform that can run clinically approved algorithms on the data and provide relevant information to Clinicians to allow them to make informed decisions.

The Dedalus Digital Connect 4 Health (DC4H) platform brings together the components that health organisations need to turn their extensive data streams into clinical insights – fed back into the systems of record. The DC4H platform allows innovation leveraging your existing systems of record minimizing the need to upgrade. It provides native FHIR capabilities, translations from traditional HL7 v2 messages to FHIR resources (in real-time), as well as clinical tagging, links to AI, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and real-time analytics in a robust, secure and agile platform.

To read Chris' phenomenal FHIR A-Z series click here!