While the healthcare industry marches forward with FHIR® adoption and implementations, it’s important to remember the critical component which ties everything together: the patient. More than anyone else, it’s the patient who stands to gain the most from semantic interoperability, requiring them to be educated on the benefits.

In every aspect of a patient’s life, they control as much as possible to benefit themselves. They control the money in their bank account and decide to save their money or spend it as they deem fit. Why shouldn’t this apply to their healthcare data as well? By controlling their own healthcare data, patients can search for new health insurance plans that best meet their needs, they can discover research organizations to understand their conditions better, or they can share their data with organizations to help others down the road.

When it comes down to it, every patient needs to have a Personal FHIR Record (PFR) as each of us is a patient at one time or another. Let me help you understand the benefits of increased interoperability that that you would experience as a patient.

What is a FHIR Server?

In order to understand the importance of a Personal FHIR Record, it’s necessary to know what a FHIR server is. Today most data is stored in proprietary databases which use their own formats and their own relationships. This prevents data from being truly interoperable. It is like the sending entity is speaking one language while the receiving entity speaks another. Without translation, they can’t understand each other rendering the shared data useless. CMS has now designated HL7 FHIR® standard to serve as the common language for communication by both the sender and receiver, making semantic interoperability possible. A patient data repository built on a FHIR® server can aggregate and store all the data available from different entities (primary care physician, specialist, hospital, Medicare) in this standardized format in one place. This standardized format allows for FHIR servers and other FHIR-enabled applications to send and receive data across multiple locations.

What is a PFR?

We’ve discussed the details of the Personal FHIR Record (PFR) in a previous blog. For this discussion, it’s essential to understand that a PFR is a FHIR server for a single person. This tool allows a patient to create a record that can follow them from place-to-place for true portability. Signing up is as easy as creating an email address. Sharing data is as simple as sharing a web address.

Patients Can Take an Active Role in Their Healthcare

Patient engagement has been a factor of government compliance for years, to varying degrees of success. The significant difficulty in this system has been the fractured market of services and portals that differ from provider-to-provider and hospital-to-hospital. Siloed patient data living in one system or another without any way to easily move the data between them. The most important benefit of FHIR supported interoperability is the ability for patients to engage in their healthcare.

An example of that kind of engagement comes from patients engaging with their insurance plans. Interoperability can help patients take their data and quickly transmit it as needed while choosing an insurance plan. As it exists today, this process is time-intensive and prone to errors. Both of those issues could be resolved by allowing a patient to take a copy of their data from their PFR and securely transmitting it to the insurance carrier. Another time-intensive aspect of insurance engagement are pre-authorizations. These can often be a hassle, but with the ability to quickly and easily share data, the costs can be lessened or even eliminated.

Another great benefit of a PFR is the patient’s ability to implement connectivity between third party app developers. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon are all jumping on board for FHIR. Their connection with the tech that patients use every day allows for fitness trackers and other health apps integrated into the patient’s overall health record. Patients who are tracking calories, tracking their sleep, or logging their exercise will be able to quickly and easily transmit that data to their healthcare provider in the same way that their providers will be able to transmit data back to them.

Patients can, of course, control exactly what data and with whom they want to share. For example, it is up to the patient to decide whether they will share data from their last provider visit, the last month, or the last year. They can also control the types of data which are shared. For instance, they could choose to share only prescribed medications, or they could choose diagnoses and treatments. Granular control of what is shared allows for greater privacy and a better sense of control over the patient’s data.

Adult Caregivers Can Benefit From FHIR

Being able to keep track of data from multiple systems can be difficult for even individual patients, but for adult caregivers, it takes on a whole new level of difficulty. Luckily a PFR can help ease that burden massively by allowing a single point with which all data streams can connect. This centralization of data makes it very easy to aggregate data and review it in bulk. It eliminates the need for time-intensive phone calls and records requests, allowing caregivers to transport data between appointments and providers easily. A secondary benefit is administrative efficiencies in the form of less time filling out forms and doing redundant lab tests. With the ease of data portability, the data collected one day can be in another doctor’s hands the next, or perhaps even near real-time.

FHIR Improves Patient Care

We touched on the many benefits that FHIR allows for providers in our last blog. It should go without saying that improved quality of care is good for both providers and patients. FHIR is unique in that it eases burdens allowing providers to focus their patient’s clinical needs and less on administrative duties. It also provides for a wide variety of more direct benefits.

For example, secure aggregation of data from numerous specialties will allow providers to identify patterns in patient health that lead to multiple comorbidities. Recognizing those patterns is the first step toward improving outcomes for those patients and for future patients as well. Additionally, this will allow providers to issue improved preventive care for patients who are beginning to show early warning signs.

Another excellent application for a PFR is a safety net in emergencies. Imagine being able to instantly provide a full medical history when visiting an emergency room while on vacation. With FHIR that can be the reality. Improved portability and interoperability will lead to more timely and safer patient care.

As time goes on and FHIR becomes more deeply ingrained into the healthcare industry, even more benefits and improvements for patients will be available. FHIR offers a promise to patients for true portability and precise control on a scale that has yet to be seen in the healthcare industry. It will, however, be up to providers and payers to adopt this technology and introduce it to patients. There are already many applications emerging which will fuel FHIR even further. One of those applications is BlueButtonPRO which is as easy to use as signing up for an email address.

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