The primary goal of the Federated Health Information Model (FHIM) is to enable interoperable health information exchange within an organization and externally with the broader health community.  To do this, the FHIM provides a consistent health-related set of content explicitly aligned with other industry information models and standards.  In this way, FHIM helps address a) the “too many standards” problem in healthcare and also b) data inconsistencies within and between standards.  It supports the exchange of meaningful, interoperable information, quickly and accurately, for the betterment of patient care.

The FHIM’s 40+ content domains are modeled so that they can be easily transformed into industry-standard information exchange formats.  The FHIM currently supports transformations to HL7 FHIR, HL7 CDA, and NIEM, but is capable of supporting other standards, including HL7 version 2, NCPDP and ASC X12.  The FHIM is a Logical Information Model developed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) open standard.  The use of UML provides multiple benefits, including

• easy, efficient transformation of FHIM content to almost any information exchange format
• simple, integrated binding of FHIM content to terminologies and value sets
• the ability to export the FHIM model to other modeling tools (e.g., Sparx EA)

The FHIM uses a modeling style aligned with the HL7 Clinical Quality Framework and the HL7 Clinical Information Modeling Initiative (CIMI):  there is a clear boundary between clinical concepts (bound to clinical terminologies) and the context in which the concepts are used. This enables generation of clinical artifacts suitable for automated workflow, automated clinical decision support, reasoning, and secondary uses such as medical research.

The FHIM can be used to Architect the informatics of an organization. FHIM is aligned with virtually all existing and emerging healthcare information technology standards, including those issued by Health Level Seven (HL7) and those required by US government regulations and endorsed or profiled by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)).

The FHIM is not, however, limited to use in the US.  Almost all concepts in the FHIM are needed by virtually every health organization. The FHIM is a superset of standards (primarily HL7, NCPDP, and ASC X12) that health organizations need to implement.  We estimate that FHIM content supports approximately 85-90% of the information health organizations currently exchange.  The FHIM has been implemented in and outside of the United States – especially for clinical content.

Note to the reader: the FHIM is a single integrated model, whereby diagrams are simply a view into the model. Each diagram shows only a portion of the model; otherwise it would become too unwieldy to navigate. The FHIM is divided into subsets of information called domains or packages. When a class in a diagram comes from a different package, it will contain "(from)" beneath the class name followed by the name of the other package that contains that class. Therefore, whenever you see a class on a diagram that contains "(from)", view that other package for more information on what other relationships that class may have.