Moving From Standards to Implementation: Building HL7's New FHIR Ecosystem

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), created by HL7 more than a decade ago, has grown to become a global standard for exchanging data in nearly 50 countries. Its broad adoption has taken many forms, as the opportunities for implementation have been met with innovative solutions. At the same time, the FHIR Accelerator Program has developed implementations and applications for patient care, health payment systems, public health, patient engagement, clinical and basic research and social determinants of health. Despite efforts to coordinate the creation of applications in increasingly diverse use cases, there have been challenges to ensure semantic interoperability, security and privacy, and consistent reliability. HL7's new Standards Implementation Division addresses many of these issues and creates a unique ecosystem that allows continuous testing and certification, supports a global education program and serves to harmonize the diverse FHIR implementation community.