Visual FHIR: An Interactive Browser to Navigate HL7 FHIR Specification

The HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification is emerging as a next generation standards framework for the exchange of electronic health records (EHR) data. The rich semantic representation and sophisticated structure definition of the FHIR requires a relatively deep learning curve to understand and utilize. The objective of our study is to design and develop a user-friendly interface for navigating and manipulating the FHIR specification. We prototyped a visualization platform for interactively exploring FHIR core resources and profiles. We evaluated the utility of the FHIR visualization platform using the evaluation metrics mainly focusing on its usability, interactive mechanisms and content expressiveness. We demonstrated that the visualization techniques are helpful for navigating the HL7 FHIR specification and aiding its profiling.