How global is FHIR? The short answer is nobody knows.
If FHIR required a commercial license, someone would have precise figures for its global reach and uptake.
But FHIR is free. No sign up form, no registration, no membership.
As such we don’t know how prevalent its use is in different countries.
We rely on anecdote, gut feelings and impressions that we have based on who is talking about FHIR, who is asking questions and where they are asking them from.
The State of FHIR Survey that Diego and Ward presented at DevDays a few weeks ago provided a lot of valuable information, but for various reasons some countries were not represented.
African countries were missing, yet I know from direct outreaches that there are many teams working with FHIR in Kenya and in Ethiopia.
My own website stats tell a similar story.
The site contains a few hundred articles I wrote about FHIR over the past three years. It ranks highly with Google for many of the key words around FHIR.
Everyone who lands on the site is searching for a FHIR related topic — it doesn’t rank for anything else.
Here’s a visual representation of where that search traffic came from this year.
And here’s a more detailed breakdown of the top countries listed by page loads.
Discount the Ireland figures. Once you remove me and my people Ireland is a FHIR desert.
There are no surprises in the top represented countries. We all know that FHIR is in heavy use in the US and in Europe, and that a lot of large US companies have development offices in India.
Where it gets interesting is when you look at the countries further down the list. Bear in mind that these are English language search queries, so it’s surprising to see any results from many of the countries listed.
- Brazil
- Singapore
- Taiwan
- Chile
- Ethiopia
- China
We don’t hear much about FHIR in these countries, but it’s being used in each one. Maybe on official projects, maybe by private businesses.
Move further down the results and a whole new set of countries start appearing.
- South Korea
- Indonesia
- Turkey
- Japan
- Nepal
I had a call with a developer in Nepal last year asking questions about Practitioners. They don’t appear in the State of FHIR survey results, but teams in Nepal are using FHIR.
The message here is that use of FHIR is far more widespread than many of us realize. There’s a western bubble on LinkedIn, and possibly even in the public FHIR community.
I know from one of Grahame’s talks at DevDays that Africa is very much on HL7’s radar, but it’s very much not on the public stage when it comes to FHIR.
So how global is FHIR?
It’s not in Western Sahara or Greenland, but it’s almost everywhere else.
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