FHIR R4 is published

HL7 is pleased to announce that FHIR R4 is now published.

R4 is the culmination of 18 months of extensive work to finalize the base parts of the specification, and incorporate changes and enhancement requests received from implementation partners across the world.

The most significant change in FHIR Release 4 is that the base platform of the standard has passed a normative ballot, and will be submitted to ANSI as a normative standard. This means that future changes should be backward compatible, so that applications that implement the normative parts of R4 no longer risk being non-conformant to the standard. The following portions of the standard are now normative:

• The RESTful API, the XML and JSON formats, and the basic datatypes
• The Terminology layer (CodeSystem and ValueSet)
• The Conformance Framework (StructureDefinition and CapabilityStatement)
• The key resources Patient and Observation

Thousands of other R4 updates and changes have been made in response to implementation experience and quality review processes.

FHIR Release 4 marks a significant milestone with the introduction of a normative base. This new maturity will help support our very active and growing community

Credits

Publishing a new Version of FHIR is a massive piece of work involving  a big community. It’s impossible to track – let alone acknowledge – everyone who’s contributed to publishing FHIR R4. We’ve given it a go in the credits page.