Health Care in the Age of Interoperability Part 5: The Personal Health Record

About this series This is the fifth in a series of articles on the dramatic transformation taking place in health informatics in large part because of the new Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. The first article provided background on health care, electronic health record systems for physicians, and the challenges they both face along with the potential of interoperability to help overcome them. The second introduced the basics of the FHIR standard and some suggested resources for those who are interested in its further exploration. The third introduced SMART on FHIR which, based on its wide adoption, has become the default standard FHIR app platform. The fourth looked at clinical decision support, arguably the single most important provider-facing use case for FHIR. This article introduces the personal health record and tools that can utilize the data stored in it as an important use case for FHIR in support of patients. The articles in this series are intended to introduce researchers from other fields to this one and assume no prior knowledge of health care or health informatics. They are abstracted from the author's recently published book, Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's New API is Transforming Healthcare (Springer International Publishing: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319934136).