Should Your Project Use FHIR? Criteria and Cautionary Notes
Should your project use FHIR? - Darren Devitt Darren Devitt
Summary
FHIR is useful when there are requirements for data sharing, regulatory mandates, or customer expectations. However, adopting it merely because of its status as a 'future standard' can increase unnecessary complexity and workload, risking project stagnation.
Details
This article provides criteria for deciding whether to adopt FHIR in healthcare data projects. FHIR is a powerful standard for ensuring interoperability, making it particularly effective when there is a need to share data across multiple organizations or applications, or when specific regional/national regulations mandate its use. Furthermore, if customers are already utilizing or sending data via FHIR APIs, this serves as a critical justification for adoption. Conversely, the article warns against adopting FHIR merely because it is considered 'industry standard' or because other teams are using it. The author shares an experience where implementing FHIR in an internal application—where no data sharing was required—resulted in unnecessary infrastructure complexity and development overhead, causing project delays. The core message is that technical decisions must be based on business requirements. It is crucial to constantly ask the question: 'Why are we using FHIR?' In conclusion, adopting FHIR should be limited to cases where there is a clear reason among 'data sharing,' 'regulatory compliance,' or 'customer demand.' Using it for other purposes should be avoided.
Technology Note
FHIR（Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources）は医療データ交換の国際標準。このエントリの関連技術: FHIR
Original content copyright by respective publishers