A report about the data maturity of local authority social care teams in Wales has made a number of recommendations around support for ‘FHIR’ compatibility in the sector.
FHIR, which is pronounced like the word ‘fire’, stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. It’s a framework for determining how different types of data are described so that it can be shared between computer systems.
Making it easier to share data between different organisations helps make services more efficient.
Here, Owen Davies, our Data and Intelligence Manager, explains what FHIR is, how it works, and why it’s important to social care.
What is FHIR?
FHIR is a systematic way of describing data in a standardised or consistent way.
There are lots of different computer systems made by lots of different manufacturers in health and social care and each system stores its data in its own unique way. This is what makes it so difficult to share information with each other.
FHIR isn’t a piece of technology, it’s a framework that includes rules for how we describe this data.
It isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach either. FHIR is flexible and can adapt to different use cases.
It’s been chosen as the health and care interoperability framework in all four UK nations, and around the world.
Why is FHIR important to social care?
FHIR will allow data to be standardised in social care, which makes it easier to share, move between systems and maintain.
Data standards were identified as the number one priority in the Strategic approach to social care data.
FHIR will allow us to meet the requirements of the National Data Resource, making it easier to share data with health colleagues and each other.
It’s a UK and international standard, so it’s also likely to be implemented by systems suppliers as standard in future.
How does it work?
FHIR creates a common way to describe most of the data we use across health and social care.
It can be read by machines, but it can also be accessed and understood by human users.
FHIR allows systems to connect to each other using something called an Application Programming Interface, or API. This is just a way of getting computers to talk to each other and exchange data. They’re very common, and you use them every day without knowing it.
FHIR is managed as an open source project by HL7, a non-profit organisation. This means it’s not owned by a company that’s looking to make money from it – it's kept up to date by its community of users.
It allows for a degree of flexibility and caters for different systems, the different ways people describe the same data, and allows data that’s very specific to a particular use case. It does this by using features such as profiles, extensions and FHIR façades.
What are profiles, extensions and façades?
A profile is a different way of describing the same data. For example, service user, patient and person in need of care and support are all ways to describe an individual. It tweaks the ‘core’ specification by setting the rules about which elements (data fields) are used or not used, what additional elements are added, and which terminologies are used. Profiles also describe how the rules might change for different use cases, such as having different points of contact depending on the service being provided.
An extension takes into account all of the other elements that aren’t part of the core profile described above. These elements are use-case specific, so they aren’t part of a common requirement. For example, clinical trial data, or fostering assessments, might be specific to a particular service and not data that would be sharable in day-to-day operations. These would be extensions to the core dataset.
A FHIR façade is a piece of software that sits between the FHIR application and a database or healthcare system. The FHIR façade acts as a ‘translator’, pointing the FHIR server in the right direction to send or retrieve the correct data to or from the backend system. It also handles the security between the two systems, so only processes requests from those authorised to see the data.
What are our plans?
We’ll remain a committed partner with the HL7 UK Core SC Four Nations group – a collection of government, NHS and commercial software suppliers who are all interested in developing FHIR for social care in the UK.
We’ll commission work to help us start developing Wales-specific FHIR Minimum Operational Data Standards (MODS) for social care, using work that’s already been done in England
as a starting point.
We’ll also consider the other recommendations of the data maturity report and talk to our partners about how we work together to deliver them.
Find out more
For more information about FHIR standards or the data maturity report, contact data@socialcare.wales.
