QUEZON CITY, Philippines – The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia) organized the first workshop on Health Level Seven International – Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7-FHIR) in the Philippines last 28-29 August 2018 at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Attended by 19 participants from various Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Health Information Technology Providers (HITPs) and hospitals, the two-day workshop introduced the concept and principles of FHIR. It also included hands-on training sessions on setting-up of a FHIR-based server, data modeling using FHIR, and related exercises on a client application.

FHIR is regarded as a leading draft standard in healthcare today. Currently, the largest digital health innovation projects in the United States of America (USA), such as Cerner and Epic are implementing FHIR as a standard.  It uses logical and theoretical models to make data exchange between healthcare applications consistent, easy to implement, and rigorous.

FHIR builds a set of resources or exchangeable content that satisfy the majority of common use cases in healthcare interoperability. This process aims to make health data exchange process less complex to developers while maintaining high semantic depth or the ability to collect large amounts of data. It supports the exchange for data, messages, services, and application RESTful APIs. FHIR’s principle is to apply standards that will only cover 80% of what is needed in a use case; the rest of the 20 % will be allotted for additional demands and other extensions.

For more information, SIL-Asia’s briefer on HL7-FHIR is available here. SIL-Asia’s FHIR server may also be accessed for testing purposes.

The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia is a regional health interoperability laboratory powered by the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) and supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with sponsorship from The People’s Republic of China Poverty Reduction and Regional Cooperation Fund (PRC Fund).

The concept for the Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia was first conceived at the Regional Interoperability Workshop organized by AeHIN in Manila last August 2015 at the sidelines of the Global Health Research Forum. The regional lab was designed to serve as a template of labs in each country that will later form into the Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL).