The Use of FHIR in Digital Health - A Review of the Scientific Literature.

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), an international standard for exchanging digital health data, is increasingly used in health information technology. FHIR promises to facilitate the use of electronic health records (EHRs), enable mobile technologies and make health data accessible to large-scale analytics. Until now, there is no comprehensive review of scientific articles about FHIR and its use in digital health. Here, we aim to address this gap and provide an overview of the main topics associated with FHIR in the scientific literature. For this, we screened all articles about FHIR on Web of Science and PubMed and identified the main topics discussed in these articles. We also explored the temporal trend and geography of publications and performed some basic text mining on article abstracts. We found that the topics most commonly discussed in the articles were related to data models, mobile and web applications as well as medical devices. Since its introduction, the number of publications about FHIR have steadily increased until 2017, indicating an increasing popularity of FHIR in healthcare (in 2018, publication numbers remained stable). In sum, our study provides an overview of the scientific literature about FHIR and its current use in digital health.