HL7 is pleased to announce that Release 3 of FHIR has just been published.

The FHIR community invested a huge amount of work in this release – hundreds of people have contributed to the specification, and there have been thousands of Change Proposals processed (>2400). Most of these change proposals arose from 3 different places:

• Implementation Experience (Trial use is working)
• Alignment with other standards
• Internal Quality Review processes

Some of the key changes:

• Added support for Clinical Decision Support and Clinical Quality Measures
• Broadened functionality to cover key clinical workflows
• Further development of Terminology Services, and support for Financial Management
• Defined an RDF format, and how FHIR relates to Linked Data
• Incremental improvements and increased maturity of the RESTful API and conformance framework

The FHIR specification is very much the living record of the community of users who share the experience of trying to solve problems with it. It’s getting ever more difficult to provide meaning recognition to all the people and organizations who contribute. Still, we’ve tried – see the FHIR credits page.

In addition to FHIR Release 3, today we’ve also published the first release of the US Core Implementation Guide. This generalizes the lessons of learnt through the Argonaut process, and publishes the agreements as a base profile for all use of FHIR in the US context. ONC and other (e.g. HSPC) implementation guides will build on this, and the Core Implementation Guide will provide a general base for consistency across all these contexts.

We expect that the FHIR specification will continue to evolve in the future as we responds to the interoperability needs of the robust FHIR implementation community. Our priority is to advance the well tested platform parts of the FHIR standard to a full ANSI-approved normative standard. I will post more about this later.