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The Federated Health Information Model (FHIM) describes the health-related information required by health organizations to achieve interoperability both within and external to an organization. The FHIM is a Logical Information Model developed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) open standard. The FHIM can be used to help guide the Enterprise Architecture of an organization. The FHIM model is aligned with existing and emerging healthcare Information Technology standards, such as those issued by Health Level Seven (HL7), as well as standards required by various government regulations (in the United States, this includes those endorsed or profiled by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)).

PLEASE NOTE that while the FHIM was originally developed by U.S. Federal Government agencies to meet their interoperability and enterprise architecture needs, the FHIM is NOT specific to the U.S. Federal Government! The Federal Government is obligated to follow the same regulations as the rest of industry, and almost all concepts in the FHIM are needed by any health organization, especially those operating in the United States. Rather, the FHIM is a superset of the concepts found in the standards (primarily from HL7, NCPDP, and ASC X12) that all health organizations need to implement. Indeed, outside of the use of SNOMED and RxNorm codes in FHIM Value Sets, the FHIM is not even specific to the United States. The FHIM can and has been used outside of the United States – especially for clinical domains.

One of the primary goals of the FHIM is to enable interoperable information exchange within an organization and externally with the broader health community, to include public health reporting. Therefore, the FHIM provides harmonized, consistent data structures as the basis for information exchange, and provides traceability and alignment into industry information models and standards. FHIM classes and attributes are modeled so that they can be easily transformed into intermediate models from which industry-standard artifacts can be generated. The FHIM currently supports transformations to HL7 FHIR, HL7 CDA, and NIEM, and is capable of supporting transformation to other standards, including HL7 version 2, NCPDP, etc. In other words, the FHIM is designed to be able to generate "profiles" and "implementation guides" for the targeted standard in order to support specific interoperability use cases.

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

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)", please view that other package for more information on what other relationships that class may have.