Navigating between Heavy-weight and Light-weight Standardization

FHIR is large and far-reaching but deliberately open-ended. Many details are expected to vary from country to country and industry to industry, and thus are left up to extensions that various players will design later. It is precisely in the extensions that the risk lurks of reproducing the Tower of Babel that exists in other health care standards.

Andy Oram

The reason the industry have good hopes for success this time is the unusual way in which the Argonaut project was limited in both time and scope. It was not supposed to cover the entire health field, as standards such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) try to do. It would instead harmonize the 90% of cases seen most often in the US. For instance, instead of specifying a standard of 10,000 codes, it might pick out the 500 that the doctor is most likely to see. Instead of covering all the ways to take a patient’s blood pressure (sitting, standing, etc.), it recommends a single way. And it sticks closely to clinical needs, although it may well be extended for other uses such as pharma or Precision Medicine.

Finally instead of staying around forever to keep chopping off more tasks to solve, the Argonaut project would go away when it was done. In fact, it was supposed to be completed one year ago. But FHIR has taken longer than expected to coalesce, and in the meantime, the Argonaut project has been recognized as a fertile organization by the vendors. So they have extended it to deal with some extra tasks, such as an implementation guide for provider directories, and testing sprints...