FHIR Box to Contribute to Hospital Accreditation: The Future of Medical Data Interoperability in Taiwan

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According to the vice director at the Industrial Technology International Strategy Development Institute, Taiwan aims to integrate a 'FHIR Box' utilizing FHIR standards into hospital accreditation via the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Information Department. This is seen as a critical step toward making electronic health record (EHR) and data exchange smoother when patients receive medical services. The current limitation is that while the government-led EEC Inquiry Center allows cross-hospital access, it is limited to text content only, and imaging data cannot be exchanged. The FHIR Box would define all database contents using different fields (20 defined slots), marking the first step in data linkage. The second stage involves establishing real-time medical record retrieval. Currently, hospitals primarily use off-peak hours for scheduled patients. For emergency or walk-in patients on the same day, immediate access to records requires advanced infrastructure like fiber optic networks. The third stage is AI integration. The primary use of cross-hospital data is meeting medical needs; secondarily, anonymized shared data can be used as a foundation for developing AI products. If the conversion of EHR includes imaging data, it allows different hospitals' independently trained AI models to become interoperable. The director emphasized that this FHIR database promotion enables various hospitals to collect data across layers and systems, promoting the development of smart healthcare industries in remote areas and achieving social goals like medical equity.