Introducing the 2024 Draft Federal FHIR® Action Plan

ASTP released the 2024 Draft Federal FHIR® Action Plan, a curated catalog of federal agency uses of the Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard and associated implementation specifications. Federal agencies are adopting and using FHIR to meet a range of agency needs, including facilitating care coordination and expanding individuals access to their health information. The draft action plan serves as a single resource for federal agencies and anyone else in the health IT community looking for the FHIR-based capabilities being used today by the federal government.

The draft action plan's goal is to help build an ecosystem for innovation that strengthens consistent agency use of the FHIR standard. The FHIR standard's coordinated use across government will help break down the silos separating patients, providers, payers, public health, and research. It will also allow federal agencies to leverage data and capabilities for a broad range of federal activities and programs, including product safety and surveillance, real world evidence for regulatory approvals, research, pandemic response, and social service integration, to name a few.

Specifically, the plan focuses on six areas: Core, Network, Payment and Health Quality, Care Delivery and Engagement, Public Health and Emergency Response, and Research. For each area, we list the most mature and broadly applicable FHIR-based implementation specifications including common informative characteristics. We believe that these characteristics will help provide agencies with more context regarding the relative maturity and adoptability of the implementation specifications. The draft action plan also identifies early-stage FHIR capabilities that are not yet fully mature, and where federal engagement is either underway or being actively considered. This will help us track progress over time, as new implementation specifications get developed to meet the identified needs of agencies.

We are thrilled with the engagement, energy, and input we received from our federal agency partners throughout the development of the plan and want to thank everyone who has contributed to the process. While the draft action plan was developed primarily with federal agency input, we believe that it will provide valuable insight about federal agency priorities for industry and the FHIR standards development community. We seek further feedback from agency partners, the standards development community, and subject matter experts to help refine the information contained within. Commenters can provide direct feedback using the functionality provided on the draft action plan; comments provided by 11:59 pm ET on Monday, November 25 will be considered for the final version of the action plan. Following release of the final action plan, we plan to make updates at a regular pace as the FHIR standard is updated and new implementation specifications are developed.

Together, we hope to realize the vision of a modern 21^st century digital healthcare system that uses health IT to advance health care delivery, public health, and research to improve people's lives.

Learn More: The HHS Health IT Alignment Policy is an HHS effort to align technology standards used under HHS funded programs. This includes aligning standards for systems exchanging health information with health care systems to use the same standards already used by hospitals and health care providers across the country, wherever feasible. The Draft Federal FHIR® Action Plan will support this effort to enable data exchange using modern technologies across a wide range of use cases and HHS programs.