Glossary
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources)
An HL7-published standard for exchanging healthcare data over HTTPS using JSON or XML resources — the modern lingua franca of healthcare integrations.
FHIR (pronounced "fire") is the dominant standard for healthcare interoperability. It defines a set of resources — Patient, Observation, Encounter, MedicationRequest, and roughly 150 others — and a RESTful HTTP API for reading, writing, and searching them. Unlike its predecessor HL7v2, FHIR is JSON-native, modern, and designed for web architectures.
Most modern EHRs (Epic, Cerner/Oracle, Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Allscripts) expose FHIR APIs, often with OAuth 2.0 / SMART on FHIR for delegated access. Federal mandates under the 21st Century Cures Act require certified EHRs to support FHIR for patient and provider data access.
For AI projects, FHIR is usually the boundary between your application and the patient's clinical record. You are reading FHIR resources to build context, not writing back to them in most cases. The integration work is substantial: each EHR's FHIR implementation has quirks, the data quality varies, and the consent and access scopes (especially under SMART on FHIR) require careful design. But the standard itself is workable, well-documented, and rapidly displacing the legacy alternatives.