There is great interest and increasing number of implementations with FHIR for data sharing both nationally and internationally. This is primarily because the standard is easy to use and covers new communication needs related to data sharing with for instance mobile technology and cloud services.
The first FHIR interfaces in Norway went live between EHR and two clinical systems at Oslo University Hospital in 2015.
On a national level, helsenorge.no, The Welfare Technology program and SFM (Central Prescription Module in ePrescription solution) have FHIR interfaces in production. Other examples where FHIR is used is in Patient testresults (Pasientens prøvesvar), the Health Data Program and the Health Platform (Helseplattformen). In addition, several regional projects have used FHIR for their implementations.
The EU is committed to use FHIR as a core standard for new services [6], in the infrastructure for exchange of health data for primary use, with MyHealth@EU. FHIR will be used for representation of content and transfer of health information regarding hospital discharge report, laboratory reports and medical imaging. A transition from CDA to FHIR for existing services (e-prescription and patient summary) will be considered at a later point in time.
In the US and UK, the health IT industry adopted FHIR early, and has worked with the authorities to develop FHIR as a national standard for data sharing. Major technology providers such as Apple, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and others support this health information exchange standard.
CEN defines FHIR as an exchange format in new standards such as International Patient Summary. PCHA (publisher of Continua Design Guidelines) and IHE have partnered to use FHIR as the exchange format in their standards.
In "Innovation Insight for HL7 FHIR" (August 2018) [7], Gartner states that FHIR should be a key component for healthcare companies who want to improve the interaction ability between applications and third parties. Gartner believes that FHIR will become the global “lingua franca” for the healthcare sector. As several global organizations like Cigna, Optum and UnitedHealth Group incorporate these standards to support American operations, FHIR-based data exchange will spread across healthcare systems around the world.