Before HIMSS, I posted about my work to understand FHIR. There’s some great information in that post as I progress in my understanding of FHIR, how it’s different than other standards, where it’s at in its evolution, and whether FHIR is going to really change healthcare or not. What’s clear to me is that many are on board with FHIR and we’ll hear a lot more about it in the future. Many at HIMSS were trying to figure it out like me.

What isn’t as clear to me is whether FHIR is really all that better. Based on many of my discussions, FHIR really feels like the next iteration of what we’ve been doing forever. Sure, the foundation is more flexible and is a better standard than what we’ve had with CCDA and any version of HL7. However, I feel like it’s still just an evolution of the same.

I’m working on a future post that will look at the data for each of the healthcare standards and how they’ve evolved. I’m hopeful that it will illustrate well how the data has (or has not) evolved over time. More on that to come in the future.

One vendor even touted how their FHIR expert has been working on these standards for decades (I can’t remember the exact number of years). While I think there’s tremendous value that comes from experience with past standards, it also has me asking the question of why we think we’ll get different results when we have more or less the same people working on these new standards.

My guess is that they’d argue that they’ve learned a lot from the past standards that they can incorporate or avoid in the new standards. I don’t think these experienced people should be left out of the process because their background and knowledge of history can really help. However, if there isn’t some added outside perspective, then how can we expect to get anything more than what we’ve been getting forever (and we all know what we’ve gotten to date has been disappointing).

Needless to say, while the industry is extremely interested in FHIR, my take coming out of HIMSS is much more skeptical that FHIR will really move the industry forward the way people are describing. Will it be better than what we have today? I think it could be, but that’s not really a high bar. Will FHIR really helps us achieve healthcare interoperability nirvana? It seems to me that it’s really not designed to push that agenda forward.

What do you think of FHIR? Am I missing something important about FHIR and it’s potential to transform healthcare? Do you agree with the assessment that FHIR very well could be more of the same limited thinking on healthcare data exchange? I look forward to continue my learning about FHIR in the comments.