HL7, or Health Level Seven International, is a set of standards that transfers clinical and administrative data between software applications used by healthcare experts. It focuses on the application layer in the OSI (Open System International) model. It specifies the number of guidelines, flexible standards, and other terms by which healthcare providers can communicate with each other.
Recently, it announced an initiative that aims to help researchers in collecting and exchanging patient data in translational and clinical research. Health Level Seven developed a project, Vulcan. It uses the
HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability (FHIR) to promote data exchange. It intends to enhance better collaboration between clinical and translational fields and defines an international set of standards.
The CEO of HL7 International, Charles Jeff, said,
“Improving data sharing can bring significant benefits to medical research, which is often a time-intensive and costly process that unnecessarily delays progress in discovering treatments for medical conditions because researchers are unable to share critical information.”
He further added,
“Project Vulcan aims to develop common solutions to help partners overcome these challenges.”
The Accelerator program expands the FHIR standard and through an approach and aims to expedite FHIR availability to take care of interoperability projects. The Co-Chair and Vice President of Pfizer’s Global Product Development Operations Center of Excellence, Rob Goodwin, said,
“Using FHIR to assist translational and clinical research is a natural extension for the standard.”
The project connects the multi-stakeholder group and like health IT vendors, regulatory agencies, and more. The FHIR based technologies show that you can utilize FHIR and other standards to make patient exchange data better and interoperable for clinical research. The Pfizer product development strategic partnership and Vulcan Co-Chair, Amy Camer, said,
“The most powerful way to make research faster and less expensive is to bridge clinical care and clinical research, while keeping patient safety and compliance in mind. Vulcan’s contributions in using FHIR to streamline data collection and submission, protocol representation, clinical trial setup and management, and for other data-intensive purposes will be a game-changer for clinical research.”
ONC Proposed to Accept FHIR Standard
ONC adopted FHIR release 4. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) initiated an FHIR application called eCR now, aiming to offer public health officials a detailed and real-time view of the COVID-19 pandemic.
eCR shares the report for complete and accurate data. Furthermore, it supports the public health reporting measure of the Department of the Health and Human Services(HHS) Promoting Interoperability Programs.
For providers who don’t have EHRs, the FHIR app is available. Also, for those who have EHRs, there is a cohort-based eCR implementation.
