HL7 Fast Health Information Resources (FHIR)

See the following -

Draft TEFCA Facilitated FHIR Implementation Guide: A Public Health Perspective

On October 7, 2022, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) project released a Draft TEFCA Facilitated FHIR Implementation Guide. As described in an earlier post, the project released a specific plan for integrating HL7 Fast Health Information Resources (FHIR) into the architecture that was defined explicitly in a new Roadmap for later implementation. This draft implementation guide (IG) provides the initial proposed details for this functionality. TEFCA only poses technical requirements on its direct participants, the Qualified Health Information Networks, or QHINs, but they are not the actual sources nor destinations of the data. The actual “FHIR details” are sketchy in this IG; maybe that is by design. It seems to specify just what the QHIN needs to know to do patient discovery and move the query and response around rather than any specifics on where a query originates nor where the response goes, let alone what data is contained.

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ONC Finally Releases TEFCA—What it Might Mean to Public Health

On January 18, 2022 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) finally released version 1 of the Trusted Exchange Framework,  Common Agreement and the QHIN (Qualified Health Information Network) Technical Framework (QTF). Several years in the making, these documents represent the latest attempt at initiating a national health information exchange in the United States. This project is being managed by ONC’s Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE), The Sequoia Project, and was inspired by both the HITECH Act and 21st Century Cures Act.