Taiwan's Medical Data to Achieve Full Interoperability via FHIR Standard: Ministry of Health Advances Effort

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According to the Ministry of Health, domestic healthcare institutions currently utilize diverse electronic medical record formats. When patients seek treatment at multiple hospitals, sharing clinical records is often difficult. To solve this issue, the Ministry of Health is adopting the 'Smart on FHIR' standard architecture and aims to unify data formats across all academic medical centers under the FHIR framework. Li Jianzhang, Director of the Information Department, stated that full data format interoperability among all academic medical centers is expected to be completed this year. As part of this effort, the Ministry has been promoting a four-year 'Next Generation Electronic Medical Record Plan,' and experimental data format interoperability has already been achieved at hospitals such as Mackay, Chung Shan, and Chang Gung. Moving forward, after aiming for academic medical centers this year, the plan is to expand data format dissemination to regional and local hospitals in 2027, and further to health centers and clinics in 2028. Regarding whether FHIR will be included in hospital evaluation standards, it depends on future reforms in medical accreditation. The Deputy Minister of Health noted that the promotion of FHIR-related applications involves three stages: standardization, linking with evaluation systems/guidance, and legislation. While legislative action is premature due to current technological maturity, utilizing FHIR within hospital evaluations is expected to reduce the burden of manual data calculation for hospitals.