Applied PilotFish Healthcare Integration announces support for new FHIR standard

Applied PilotFish Healthcare Integration, Inc. (APHII), the Healthcare division of PilotFish Technology, a leading provider of middleware solutions, officially announced support today for the new FHIR standard. Health Level Seven International (HL7®) and a group of organizations and vendors have launched the Argonaut Project. This project is designed to provide acceleration funding and support the political will to publish FHIR implementation guides and profiles for query/response interoperability and document retrieval. PilotFish joins the ranks of these leaders to help move implementation of the standard forward.

FHIR holds great promise. As a standard it is different than HL7 2.x in that it defines a set of "resources" that represent granular clinical concepts. FHIR enables resources to be managed alone, or aggregated into complex documents. This flexibility is particularly suited to solve a range of interoperability problems. FHIR is a modern technology with resources that are based on simple XML, with an http-based RESTful protocol where each resource has a predictable URL. Although based on expert clinical modeling, developers are not required to understand those details. It makes it far easier for implementers.

"We believe that FHIR can transform the healthcare industry and accelerate interoperability. FHIR appears to offer more tangible benefits than past newer standards such as HL7 3.x," said Monika Vainius, EVP of Applied PilotFish Healthcare Integration. "We are pleased to rally behind the other industry leaders who have launched the Argonaut Project to accelerate the adoption of FHIR. We are offering FHIR support to our clients who are eager to work with this new standard."

PilotFish's explicit support for FHIR includes enhancing PilotFish's Data Mapper to include a FHIR format reader, permitting the drag & drop mapping of FHIR documents. The Data Mapper will display not only the XML-based FHIR schema, but the documentation associated with the various data elements, as well. Within the PilotFish Data Mapper users can enjoy the same graphical mapping ease when working with FHIR as they do already with HL7. PilotFish's integration engine has also been enhanced to validate FHIR extensions, a key component of implementing a FHIR-compliant integration.

"FHIR is a modern standard where users can leverage Web Standards. In addition to FHIR support PilotFish has already implemented support for a number of core technologies that FHIR users will benefit from, such as Web Standards like JSON, HTTP, etc. and REST-ful architecture," said Vainius. "Adding support in our product for the FHIR standard took just a few weeks of effort. It further proves our case that we truly offer a future-proof integration engine solution that can grow with an organization as technology continues to evolve."

PilotFish previewed FHIR support in its eiConsole for Healthcare interface engine IDE at the annual HiMSS15 conference in Chicago, on April 13-15, 2015.