FHIR and Its Benefits for the Healthcare System

Cell and gene therapy are emerging treatments for genetic diseases and cancers. No doubt that the biotech industry is growing exponentially at 30% CAGR. It is expected to reach around US$ 15bn by 2025. However, biotech companies that manufacture such CGT treatments still operate manually and face challenges such as unscalability, human judgement errors, irregular batch results, complex supply chain, irregularity at the patient and cellular level, cell expansion count, and the rigid programming time of the batch disposition process. All this leads to batch loss, contamination risk, low quality, variation in batch-to-batch results – these invariably increase the production cost and fail to meet the compliance guidelines.

What is FHIR?

FHIR stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. Created by HL7, it creates a data exchange standard for various medical software. Providing secure data exchange in the case of EMR, Diagnostic Data, PHI, and more, is the most popular and favored exchange for a variety of applications and software used in the medical field.

What does it achieve? FHIR is good because it combines the features of HL7 with the latest web standards. Increased interoperability in the healthcare system is the major benefit i.e new information can be exchanged more securely between phone apps, electronic health records, on healthcare system’s servers, and many other places.

The primary goal of FHIR is to standardize and simplify the method through which healthcare data was exchanged before. Now, by using it, healthcare managers, service providers, and consumers will be able to share information in a trouble-free manner by any kind of software.

Cost-effective care is a major benefit derived from the use of FHIR. FHIR uses Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to simplify the system integration module. It achieves a fast, easy, and better way to transmit ever-increasing medical data in the market. Lightweight and real-time data exchange are allowed through this protocol.

The major contribution of FHIR to the healthcare industry is –

Easy implementation Lower bar for the entry of developers Free to use Out-of-box interoperability Flexible due to the ability of adaptation in base resources Strong foundation in Web Standards

How Does It Benefit the Healthcare Systems? The main benefit of FHIR in the healthcare industry is that it will help the payers immensely. Due to the most up-to-date standard for the exchange of data, FHIR will allow the modification of the implementers leading to extensibility without violating the core standards. And there is no hassle during the actual exchange. Let’s have a look at major benefits that the healthcare sector can derive from FHIR-

Holistic Patient Experience FHIR is empowering patients. Due to extreme simplicity in the implementation and integration of this protocol across a wide array of applications and software, patients will have control over their information and how they are going to share it with the healthcare provider. This will increase their faith in the industry and will allow them to make good decisions about their treatment.

Automated Data Structure Facility When clinical support is asked for providers and professionals in the healthcare industry, automated data structuring plays a major role. A value-based approach is followed during the exchange of data between the service providers and consumers. With FHIR, better care management will be facilitated and holistic plus a trustworthy patient experience will lead to cost savings on both ends.

Improvement in Clinical Treatment When healthcare providers will have easy access to EMR and patient-related information, it will lead to better conditions in treatment and improve the efficiency of the system. Patient data is the backbone of good treatment in the healthcare industry. Especially during the research and diagnosis of the reports, previous medical records and treatment history plays a major role. With the implementation of the FHIR and the rest of the web services, data sharing standards will allow safe and easy exchange of data which will lead to efficiency and fast data sharing.

Enhancement in Data Management Real-time records will be available leading to improved data management. Data accuracy will be increased. Since, in real-time, data is derived from multiple sources across the globe from various platforms, systems, and software, it will add up to a large volume. Management of this whole data will require fast accessing and exchange across systems which is the core benefit of FHIR.

Specific FHIR for Specific Clinical Use FHIR works on the unique identifier and uses APIs for integration. Healthcare systems will be better connected by the use of FHIR and it can be used for specific protocols in specific clinical use without disturbing the overall API of the system. Resources of FHIR can be used separately with different developers to create a link where accessing is easy and classified.

Easy Third-Party Integration Each healthcare provider wants a separate system for their organization. They use a variety of third-party software as per their cost-effectiveness. The best thing about FHIR is that it works well with third-party apps and software and provides easy integration. So there is no need for specific software or systems. It works well with any kind of software.

Patient Benefits FHIR is good for patients as it will allow them to track their medical records using any recommended healthcare app or software. They will get a clear-cut picture of their clinical data. For example, Apple’s Health app for iOS pulls the information of the patient from various EHRs and other health organizations using FHIR. Now, the patient can look into his/her data using the phone and have a full picture of the stats.

Conclusion FHIR is the future of data interchange in the healthcare sector and by looking at various benefits for both the system provider and consumer (patients) we can say that the future is good. It will surely give a boost to the healthcare system and will help in making a holistic environment where better services are provided with safe and secure data exchange. For further inquiries, feel free to email at info@aventior.com.