Standardizing Taiwan's Electronic Medical Records: Aiming for Inter-Hospital Connectivity with FHIR

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Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare announced the establishment of the 'Medical Information Standard Grand Platform' to solve the problem of fragmented information due to varying electronic medical record (EMR) formats across hospitals. This initiative aims for nationwide medical data unification, with a goal of allowing patients to receive care at all major academic medical centers (23 facilities) without needing to reapply for records within two years. The core technology standard is the full adoption of FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which will standardize the EMR record format. Furthermore, CQL technology will be used to unify national health insurance reporting, quality assessment, and clinical guidelines. For AI applications, the 'SMART on FHIR' standard will be introduced to build an 'AI Medical Application Ecosystem,' ensuring seamless integration of various AI tools into medical systems. MOHW plans to start by standardizing 109 common fields (such as gender and age), allowing specialized needs (e.g., influenza virus type) to be addressed via custom Implementation Guides (IGs). In the future, this system aims to enable cloud-based access to records, helping to bridge regional disparities in healthcare access.