FHIRForm: An Open-Source Framework for the Management of Electronic Forms in Healthcare

Electronic Forms (E-Forms) for data capture are vital for most health information systems in public health and clinical research. Standardized electronic forms ensure accurate data collection, consistent form rendering, easy maintainability, and interoperability. Adopting an innovation research method we explore the challenges of standardized data capture in healthcare and offer a pragmatic solution. We appraise existing standards and software to propose the list of requirements for an ideal E-form framework. Our proposed solution leverages FHIR specification and existing open-source software tools. We discuss how our open-source solution can be extended collaboratively and discuss its value using InterRAI instruments as examples.