FHIR Interoperability: What Is It and why Should We Care?

Early in March 2020, the Office of National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized the long-awaited interoperability rule. Since this announcement, the world has been grappling with an unprecedented pandemic and the importance of interoperability has only become more urgent. 

With the COVID-19 outbreak, healthcare data interoperability has become an increasingly pressing concern for healthcare organizations. Healthcare experts have long proposed that easy sharing of clinical records among providers and data systems would result in coordinated, cost-efficient care. As a result, there’s a great deal of attention towards the data standards that will enable seamless, on-demand information exchange, such as FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource.