Through our joint venture with the Federal Health Architecture and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) IRIS provided a FHIR® Server for their Healthcare Directory Effort. This project sought to: (1) define the architecture of a proposed national resource of validated healthcare directory data, and (2) develop an HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) Based Implementation Guide, Validated Healthcare Directory (VhDir) Implementation Guide (IG), describing the exchange of information between a national resource of validated healthcare directory data and local environments (e.g. provider organizations, payers, HIEs).

The proposed national resource would include a broad set of provider data that supports a variety of healthcare directory use cases. Data would be validated against primary sources (e.g. state licensing boards for licensure information) and available to local environments through a national exchange standard. Providers would only have to attest to much of their information once for the national resource, rather than for each local environment. The draft VhDir IG has been developed and sent to FHIR for V4 Ballot.

The IRIS® FHIR® team developed the “first iteration” of a FHIR® server that will be used as the foundation for future work. The team has gathered requirements and ireviewed the VhDir IG specification to determine which of the balloted resources could be developed within the specified timeframe.