By Brian Douthit; Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD; Viet Nguyen, MD; and Titus Schleyer, DMD, PhD
Originally starting as an application showcase in 2018, the FHIR Apps Competition has become one of the most popular sessions at the AMIA Annual Symposium. From clinical decision support and health information exchange to problem-oriented displays and back-end data exchange, HL7 FHIR is enabling innovation across a whole range of health IT domains.
AMIA and HL7 recently reinvigorated their partnership to emphasize the importance of health data standards in informatics, and engage the AMIA implementer community in leveraging FHIR for research, patient care and education. The competition is intended to highlight the best and most innovative FHIR implementations – if you are planning to attend the Annual Symposium this year, you don’t want to miss it!
As we ramp up for the competition’s fifth year, we have been reflecting on how the it has impacted the FHIR community, and how it may serve to expand FHIR’s reach, impact, and use.
- Competition motivates participants to create the best FHIR app(s) possible, showcase it to an engaged audience, and disseminate it to the informatics community to be implemented for the purpose of improving patient care, reducing clinician burden and advancing research.
- Competition audience prompts many individuals to build apps for the competition who may not have done so without its inspiration.
- Event attracts not only individual and academic developers, but those in industry as well.
- Serves as a catalyst to promote synergistic partnerships between industry and healthcare systems, which is desperately needed if we want to provide the best care to patients possible.
HL7 FHIR has established a foundation to be the preeminent healthcare interoperability standard for decades to come. The AMIA community will benefit from the growth of FHIR through research opportunities and workforce leadership.
We need YOU!
Your participation in the FHIR Apps Competition and other HL7 events is what makes our community great. From your inspirational work, others have followed and chosen to adapt FHIR as the premier standard for interoperability. By showing the greater informatics community the possibilities of FHIR, we will continue to see growth through the integration of the standard by EHR vendors, use of the standard in academic research and private industry, growing involvement in HL7 working groups, and the adoption of the standard in government policy.
Submit Your FHIR App by August 2!
If you have a FHIR app being used in practice, please consider submitting to the 2022 AMIA/HL7 FHIR Applications Competition by August 2, 2022. See you in Washington, D.C.!
