HL7 vs. FHIR: Choosing the Optimal Integration Strategy for Hospital Information Systems
HL7 oder FHIR: Ihre Entscheidungshilfe - Blog - t2informatik
Summary
This article compares two standards, legacy HL7 v2 and modern FHIR, addressing data integration challenges in hospital IT. It explains which standard is better suited for an appropriate integration strategy, suggesting that FHIR holds an advantage, especially when developing new systems or considering long-term investment.
Details
The healthcare IT sector requires integrating patient and lab data between various systems like PDMS and KIS. Historically, HL7 v2 has been used for this purpose. However, compared to modern RESTful API environments, HL7 v2 is described as an event-driven message format that faces limitations in structured data extraction and reuse. In contrast, FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) utilizes a REST API foundation, treating entities like patients or observations as 'Resources' manipulated via HTTP methods (GET, POST, etc.). This provides clear data structures and facilitates use across diverse programming languages. When comparing the two, HL7 v2 excels in information sharing through messaging (Push), while FHIR adopts a client-pull model, allowing clients to retrieve necessary data. FHIR is noted for recommending OAuth 2.0 authentication and encrypted connections, making it suitable for wide-area and third-party data exchange, such as within Germany's Telematikinfrastruktur. The author advises that even if maintaining existing systems is necessary, development resources should be invested in FHIR long-term. For new system development, choosing FHIR is recommended due to its superior flexibility and scalability.
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