Health Informatics On FHIR

Electronic health record systems (EHRs) are now widely used by physicians but often don’t share data (interoperability) or provide efficient user interfaces. They also often fail to support efficient workflow and process or to provide clinical decision support to help physicians make accurate diagnoses, avoid mistakes, and prescribe optimal therapies. Patients should be more involved in their own care but usually lack tools to make that intuitive and easy. The new FHIR standard combines a simplified data model with web services to provide a vehicle for developing interoperable solutions to these problems by essentially turning proprietary EHR systems into an 'open' app platform facilitating rapid deployment and commercialization of successful apps. FHIR also offers the prospect of aggregating data from many EHRs for use in analytics to discover new medical knowledge. Teams will design and develop real world FHIR apps to help solve problems they define or that are posed by mentors from the various project partners and sponsors. They will use Georgia Tech’s FHIR and SMART on FHIR platforms located in the Interoperability & Integration Innovation Lab.