FHIM Value Proposition

In the decade of the twenty-teens, over five million dollars and tens of thousands of person hours were dedicated to creating, expanding, and maintaining the FHIM.  The FHIM is designed to help mend a critical gap affecting all federal agencies that share health data:  the need for a consensus-driven and globally agreed information model that has standards-based terminology bindings to it.  The FHIM puts these two essential interoperability requirements together.  They are basic to all other efforts to transfer data in a meaningful manner.  Viewed in this light, an information model like the FHIM is necessary for all healthcare stakeholders--public and private.

How The Open Group Is Addressing the FHIM Value Proposition

1. The FHIM is a single map of health and healthcare information and clinical terminology that contains the relational content needed to create complete FHIR profiles, CDA profiles, and profiles for other standards mapped to the model.

2. The FHIM harmonizes across standards and organizational requirements. 

3. The Healthcare Forum strives to attract members (public and private) who will help keep the FHIM current by:

   1. Adding data requirements to meet their interoperability needs

   2. Mapping the model to standards of choice (determined by forum members)

FHIM Profile Builder (FPB^TM) Value Proposition

A better understood, more accessible, and easier to use FHIM can help developers automate FHIR (and other standards-based) profile building efforts.  The FHIM Profile Builder^TM can produce consistent and re-useable profiles for information exchange "without special effort" (an important and clearly somewhat subjective phrase used in the 21st Century Cures Act.)  An accessible and easy to use FHIM/FPB can be a key component of the success of interoperability efforts in the US, Europe, and developing countries--globally! 

The idea for the FHIM Profile Builder was born during the three months--from October-December 2018--when the FHIM Transition Council (FTC) met with support from the ONC.  The FTC agreed that:

• FHIR^c is immensely popular, in large part because it is relatively easy to use and helps solve the data transfer problem in interoperability.
• However, FHIR, by design, does not ensure that health data that is meaningfully shared in one implementation instance can be meaningfully shared in any other implementations.
• As a result, the widespread adoption of FHIR is producing thousands of profiles that cannot be reused "without special effort."
• A FHIM profile builder would assist the FHIR community by producing reusable, standard based profiles, and thereby help significantly advance interoperability.

How The Open Group is Addressing the FPB Value Proposition:

1. The FPB can be used to ensure that FHIR (and other) profiles provide consistent meanings and meet use case requirements.
2. The need for a common model that analyzes all requirements has long been recognized, but there has not yet been a successful attempt to meet this need.  The FHIM can meet this gap/need.
3. To support this value proposition, we have:
   1. Made the FHIM easier to use (by removing the need to interact directly with UML) 
   2. Created a "Profile Editor" that makes it easier to consistently create easily re-useable FHIR Profiles to create FHIM templates.
   3. Developed a "Profile Generator" (based on MDHT) that offers easy access to the FHIM model to build FHIR profiles that apply, consistently, to specific use cases.
   4. This applies to CDA, FHIR, and other exchange standards and can be built out to apply to other health information standards.
4. FHIM can be used to access compliance and conformance with rules and validation testing