Audience
Healthcare application developers in need of a solution to implement standardized RESTful APIs for interoperable electronic health record systems
About HL7 FHIR
FHIR is described as a 'RESTful' specification based on common industry-level use of the term REST. In practice, FHIR only supports Level 2 of the REST Maturity Model as part of the core specification, though full Level 3 conformance is possible through the use of extensions. Because FHIR is a standard, it relies on the standardization of resource structures and interfaces. This may be considered a violation of REST principles but is key to ensuring consistent interoperability across diverse systems. For each "resource type," the same set of interactions is defined, which can be used to manage the resources in a highly granular fashion. Applications claiming conformance to this framework claim to be conformant to "RESTful FHIR." Note that in this RESTful framework, transactions are performed directly on the server resource using an HTTP request/response.