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Healthcare environment where fitness trackers, patient apps, hospital systems, pharmacy software, and lab tools effortlessly exchange data. In this imagined world, any concerned party from patient to physician to medical researcher can instantly access corresponding files via smartphones.

Key Standards of healthcare data exchange

Healthcare sticks to data standards that help industry systems and professionals be on the same page. You may learn more about codes and formats used across the industry from our article Data Standards in Healthcare. Here, we’ll focus only on the most critical norms related to data exchange via API.

FHIR API and its Role in Interoperability

Short for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, FHIR is the main industry standard, developed for sharing healthcare data, specifically Electronic Health Records. It utilizes the REST API architecture, implemented on HTTPS (HTTP Secure) protocol, and enables health systems to exchange data in JSON and XML formats. The idea behind FHIR is to represent patient records as a set of resources, or separate data pieces of the same size and structure. Each resource has a unique ID and contains a small portion of information (say, a lab result or medication details). Depending on the query, the FHIR-based API retrieves a single resource or a combination merged in a larger document.

USCDI standard

USCDI stands for United States Core Data for Interoperability. It defines a set of mandatory data pieces to be exposed via their FHIR APIs at a patient’s request.

The data elements in USCDI align with those in FHIR and fall into larger data classes such as

• Allergies and Intolerances,
• Assessment and Plan of Treatment,
• Care Team Members,
• Clinical Notes,
• Goals,
• Health Concerns,
• Immunizations,
• Laboratory Tests and Results,
• Medications,
• Patient Demographics,
• Problems,
• Procedures,
• Provenance,
• Smoking Status,
• Unique Device Identifiers for a Patient’s Implantable Devices, and
• Vital

The second version of USCDI, which is now in the draft stage contains two new classes: Diagnostic Imaging and Encounter Information.