NucLexNuclear Medicine Lexicon and Theranostics Ontology
Stage W0: private living prototype12 of 30 manuscripts drafted, 0 reviewed; 50 lexicon entries in draftWhat each later stage would need to show

Lexicon · Mathematical and computational foundations

Lexicon entryDraftNX-C017

FHIR

Fully specified name: FHIR (concept)

HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, a standard for exchanging healthcare information.

Scope note
FHIR includes terminology resources but is not a single clinical ontology.
Synonyms
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources
Monograph
FHIR terminology resources (draft)
External mappings
None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
Formal status
Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.

Notes

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is the HL7 standard for exchanging healthcare data. It defines resources, each a structured unit such as Patient, Observation, Procedure, or MedicationAdministration, and a RESTful interface for creating, reading, and searching them over the web, with JSON and XML serializations. Release 5 (R5) is the current normative-track version, and much deployed software still uses Release 4.

The scope note addresses a common confusion. FHIR specifies how information is packaged and transported, and it specifies terminology resources (Code system, Value set, Concept map) that describe vocabularies and bind coded fields to them. It does not itself define the clinical meanings; those come from the code systems the fields are bound to, such as SNOMED CT or LOINC. A system that exchanges valid FHIR resources has achieved structural interoperability. Whether the receiving system interprets the coded content as the sender intended is the separate question of Semantic interoperability.

For a nuclear medicine reader FHIR is the likely transport for an administered activity, an imaging report reference, or a laboratory value into any future longitudinal record, and the FHIR terminology resources are the likely form in which a NucLex vocabulary would be published for exchange. Neither has been built. The HL7 FHIR R5 specification is the authoritative reference.

Sources consulted (1)
  • https://www.hl7.org/fhir/R5/