Using FHIR to develop a healthcare mobile application

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is considered to be an emerging Health Level 7 (HL7) standard that takes advantage of the positive elements of its ancestors HL7 v2 and HL7 v3. Moreover, FHIR is based on the REST architectural style, thus being suitable for lightweight devices. This paper presents the AidIT mobile application aiming at the effective management of patients' electronic personal health records via an easy to use interface which can be accessed by multiple actors, namely the patient, the doctor and the pharmacist. We discuss the implementation benefits of using FHIR in order to integrate the mobile client and the application's server side and we also provide insights into the access control mechanisms that should govern such applications.