Building a FHIR data store

August 28, 2023
Nichole Wolf Product Marketing Manager

Create a competitive advantage in the future of healthcare

What is a FHIR data store?

A FHIR data store is a clinical data repository (CDR) that aggregates and stores healthcare data (demographics, results, images, admissions, transfers, diagnosis, etc.) from multiple source systems into a single location in HIPAA-eligible HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®). Once established, a FHIR store can serve as the foundation for real-time analytics, reporting, and data sharing.

Why FHIR?

While FHIR was designed for data exchange, not persistence, there are a variety of reasons why storage in FHIR makes sense: 

All major hyperscalers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have selected the FHIR format as the standard for clinical data ingestion and storage.

“FHIR is the gateway to AI and machine learning.”

Aashima Gupta, Global Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Google Cloud

Why build a FHIR store?

A FHIR store allows organizations to quickly turn on new use cases as business opportunities arise, compliance mandates are issued, or technology advances. By translating and normalizing healthcare data from various disparate sources into a single, secure FHIR store, organizations will enable their first intended use case, while also building a foundation that can effectively serve and accelerate all future use cases.

Adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning

The opportunities for cloud-based AI, ML, and other advanced analytics tools to transform healthcare are innumerable, but if we enable them use case by use case, it may take decades to fully expose their transformative power. Building a FHIR store is the best way to accelerate the use of AI/ML in healthcare. 

Simplify quality measure submission

NCQA is piloting the FHIR data model for digital HEDIS quality measures.  A FHIR store can streamline the process of collecting, normalizing, and submitting quality data. Once in a FHIR store, data can be checked against CQL logic and submitted by a certified NCQA data partner. It is expected the use of FHIR for quality measures will expand in the coming years, and if pending CMS rules are finalized, it may even be required. Building a FHIR store now is the best way to make sure your organization is prepared, with the added benefit of reducing human error, bias, and administrative burden.

Create longitudinal patient records

Because most legacy healthcare standards can be translated and normalized within a FHIR store, organizations can finally achieve their vision of enabling cross-system longitudinal patient records. These records can then be used as a backend by other products and applications to enhance patient engagement, manage population health, improve care, and more.

Enable app/product development

FHIR is a ground-breaking standard because it is programmable. Builders can do more with FHIR than was ever possible with HL7v2 or other legacy standards. A variety of tools have already been developed on the FHIR spec (TestScript resources, Microsoft CodeGen, SQL on FHIR, and many more). A FHIR Store, paired with cloud services and technologies is the gateway to incredible innovation.

Stay ahead of compliance and quality requirements

The ONC and CMS have shown their intention to accelerate FHIR adoption through recent interoperability mandates and proposals. Getting data in one place and in FHIR positions healthcare organizations for compliance as regulations are finalized and enforced.

The challenges of building a FHIR store

While the advantages are clear, building a FHIR store comes with challenges that can be daunting for the majority of healthcare organizations today. 

Because most healthcare data is in legacy standards (HL7v2, CDA, X12, DICOM) translation is necessary. Because there are nuances in the implementation of every standard, translating and normalizing data to FHIR can be cumbersome and overwhelming at high volumes. Our recent research found that organizations struggle to translate and enable data ingestion into the cloud due at scale to challenges with:

Human capital

68% of organizations lack the necessary human resources and/or skillsets

Financial capital

52% of organizations lack the budget required

Technical capital

44% of organizations lack the technical infrastructure

As a result, projects are lengthy and costly. Generally they:

58%

require a system integrator

86%

take longer than 6 months to complete

65%

cost more than $500k to implement

How Redox helps

Redox Nova can accelerate the creation of FHIR stores by up to 80% faster than doing it yourself or enlisting help from system integrators. Nova securely extracts data from legacy systems, translates, and normalizes to FHIR for easy onboarding into AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure FHIR stores. We achieve unmatched speeds by leveraging a library of over 4,000 configurations that we’ve cultivated over 5,000+ healthcare integrations.

Nova currently supports FHIR R4,  including support for US Core profiles based on R4.. This includes support for a growing number of FHIR extensions. Nova currently supports the following translations:

Additional details on our translation capabilities and processes can be found in our Dev Docs. We are constantly expanding and refining Nova translation capabilities as we work with our customers and through active participation in FHIR standards development. We are a proud annual sponsor of HL7 FHIR Dev Days and a regular participant in HL7 Connectathons.

Nova is built for extreme flexibility so no unicorn is out of bounds. If your organization or data sources have unique requirements, we have a full range of professional services available to deliver what you need.

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