Push Button Population Health Data: Extending the HL7® FHIR® Standard to Support Bulk Data Export

 

Activities such as managing population health, delivering value-based care, and conducting discovery science require access to large population data sets. The existing FHIR and SMART APIs work well for accessing small amounts of data, but large exports perform poorly, requiring an impractical number of API requests to be issued serially. By adding asynchronous primitives to FHIR and defining an export operation, the Bulk Data API enables secure integration of third-party, externally-hosted applications into diverse EHR and data warehouse environments.

On behalf of the ONC, The Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program and SMART hosted a meeting in December 2017 to discuss standardizing bulk data exports from EHR systems and data warehouse environments. This meeting brought together key stakeholders from across health care, including the Director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and other members of the ONC staff, as well as representatives from payers, health systems, EHR vendors, and other health technology innovators.

A detailed summary report is now available.