“The findings show that health IT market leaders, who all support FHIR, drove much of the adoption of certified API technology enabled with FHIR in 2019,” Steven Posnack, MS, MHS, deputy National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and Wes Barker, MS, HHS program analyst, wrote in an ONC Health IT Buzz blog post.
According to Posnack and Barker, “The good news is that while upgrades from FHIR Release 2 to Release 4 are likely to be necessary across many installations, many certified API developers and all health IT market leaders already support the FHIR standard,”.
“This means that third-party developers are able to connect to these providers’ EHRs using standardized FHIR APIs and health information can flow using the data standard,”, “for providers that adopted and implemented certified API technology enabled with FHIR in 2019, the results are encouraging.”
ONC expects the rates of FHIR-enabled certified API technology adoption to continue to rise as more clinicians and hospitals implement the Edition Cures Update.
“The data show that a majority of health care providers have deployed these standards-based technologies, and we project that more will soon follow,” Posnack and Barker said, and “Efforts to expand use of FHIR among data and technology users should be encouraged by this data.”