Representing Nursing Data With Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources: Early Lessons Learned With a Use Case...

Healthcare communities are rapidly embracing Health Level 7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard as the next-generation messaging protocol to facilitate data interoperability. Implementation-friendly formats for data representation and compliance to widely adopted industry standards are among the strengths of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources that are accelerating its wide adoption. Research confirms the advantages of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources in increasing data interoperability in mortality reporting, genetic test sharing, and patient-generated data. However, few studies have investigated the application of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources in nursing-specific domains. In this study, a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources document was generated for a use case scenario in a home-based, pressure ulcer care setting. Study goals were to describe the step-by-step process of generating a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources artifact and to inform nursing communities about the advantages and challenges in representing nursing data with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. Overall, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources effectively represented the majority of the data included in the use case scenario. A few challenges that could potentially cause information loss were noted such as the lack of standardized concept codes for value encoding and the difficulty directly connecting an observation to a related condition. Continuous evaluations in diverse nursing domains are needed in order to gain a more thorough insight on potential challenges that Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources holds in representing nursing data.