FHIR Documents look great on paper and they demo well. But I question their practicality in the real-world.
I wrote a post about FHIR Documents a few months ago and I’ve spent the past couple of weeks digging deeper into how they should be created and used.
This was for a real-world requirement and a real-world use case.
I admit, from a technical perspective they are impressive. I appreciate how clean and well constructed they are, and how neatly they fit into FHIR.
A combination of structured FHIR data and human readable narrative elements, all held together by a carefully crafted Composition resource.
But FHIR is all about interoperability — about sharing data between different systems and organizations.
As far as I can see, most healthcare systems cannot consume FHIR Documents.
You can’t send them to a typical HIS — they want HL7.
So who reads them? Who understands them?
Your own systems do, because you wrote the code to create the FHIR Document to begin with.
But if all you’re doing is sharing your FHIR Documents internally, why use FHIR at all?
My question to the community:
Are you using FHIR Documents to share clinical or non-clinical documents outside your own organization?
More about FHIR Documents:
https://darrendevitt.com/theres-real-power-and-potential-in-fhir-documents/
---