FHIR

FHIR standardizes clinical healthcare data representation and exchange to enable interoperable sharing of clinical information for research and clinical use.

Key Features:

• Meta-Common Data Model (CDM): FHIR functions as a meta-CDM providing a unified standard to represent clinical data across institutions for multisite clinical research collaborations.
• Clinical Asset Mapping Program for FHIR (CAMP FHIR): CAMP FHIR transforms clinical data from diverse source models into FHIR by mapping each source variable to a corresponding FHIR element and representing value sets in FHIR terms.
• Scalability and Resource Coverage: The approach supports a wide range of FHIR resources and is designed to accept input from any data model to accommodate additional resources over time.
• Data Quality Assurance: Transformed FHIR data are validated against the original source, such as an enterprise clinical data warehouse, with validation demonstrated on approximately 23,000 asthma patient records.
• Facilitation of Rare Data Sharing: Using FHIR as a CDM enables institutions to participate in rare-data sharing opportunities, supporting collaborations between academic medical centers and community hospitals.
• Visualization for Specification Analysis: A visualization tool was developed to represent FHIR resources, profiles, and extensions for exploration and analysis of the specification.

Scientific Applications:

• Translational Research: Standardized FHIR representations support cross-institutional clinical data sharing for downstream translational research applications.
• Specification Analysis and Data Exploration: Visualization and analysis of FHIR resources, profiles, and extensions support examination of content expressiveness and model structure.

Methodology:

Mapping each source variable to a FHIR element and mapping value sets to FHIR terms; validation of transformed data against the original enterprise clinical data warehouse; use of interactive visualization techniques and content expressiveness evaluation metrics; prototyping and evaluation to assess the visualization tool's ability to facilitate navigation and manipulation of FHIR resources.