What is the FHIM?
The Federated Health Information Model (FHIM) is designed to enable ubiquitous interoperable health information exchange. It can be used locally, regionally, and globally. The FHIM is a single integrated model composed of health- and healthcare-related content explicitly aligned with other industry information models and standards. The FHIM address two persistent gaps:
- the “too many standards” problem in healthcare
- data inconsistencies within and between standards
The FHIM supports the exchange of meaningful, interoperable information, quickly and accurately and consistently, for the betterment of patient care.
In development for over a decade at the cost of $5 million and y person hours, we estimate that FHIM content supports approximately 85-90% of the information health organizations currently exchange. The FHIM’s 42 detailed content domains were developed using case studies provided by subject matter experts at the VA, DoD, and many other US Federal Agencies.
The FHIM currently supports transformations to HL7 FHIR, HL7 CDA, and NIEM. However, the model can be transformed into any industry-standard information exchange format, such as HL7 version 2, NCPDP, and ASC X12, to name but a few.
The FHIM is a Logical Information Model developed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) open standard. The use of UML provides multiple benefits, including:
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
However, one need not dive into UML to use the FHIM. Click here to learn about the FHIM’s easy to use Profile Builder.
The FHIM uses a modeling style that distinguishes between clinical concepts that are 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 health and health care information concepts in the FHIM are used by virtually every health organization. The FHIM can be thought of as a superset of standards (primarily HL7, NCPDP,and ASC X12) that can be further expanded to meet any health organization’s implementation needs. The FHIM is not limited to use among US Federal Agencies. It has been implemented in the US public sector as well as outside of the United States
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. 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.