Glossary

A U.S. federal law enacted in 2016 that includes provisions to improve interoperability, prevent information blocking, and promote patient access to electronic health information.

Acronym for: Australian Core Data for Interoperability

A standardized set of health data elements designed to support interoperable health information exchange across Australia's healthcare system.

A container for a collection of FHIR resources, used for grouping resources for transmission, persistence, or processing as a single unit.

A FHIR resource that documents what features, resources, operations, and search parameters a FHIR server or client supports, enabling discovery and conformance validation.

Acronym for: Clinical Decision Support

Health information technology that provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information to enhance health and healthcare delivery.

An HL7 standard that defines a lightweight protocol for invoking external clinical decision support services from within an EHR workflow, using hook events to trigger real-time CDS card responses.

Acronym for: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

A federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs while setting interoperability requirements.

Acronym for: Current Procedural Terminology

A medical code set maintained by the American Medical Association that describes medical, surgical, and diagnostic services for billing and documentation purposes in the United States.

Acronym for: Clinical Quality Language

A Health Level 7 authoring language for expressing clinical knowledge — including quality measures, clinical decision support rules, and eligibility criteria — in a human-readable, computable format.

A Da Vinci FHIR Implementation Guide that enables payers to deliver real-time coverage guidance into EHR ordering workflows via CDS Hooks, surfacing whether a service is covered, whether prior authorization is required, and what documentation must be collected — before the order is signed.

Acronym for: Vaccine Administered Codes

A coding system developed by the CDC that identifies vaccine products administered to patients, used for immunization information systems and public health reporting.

An HL7 FHIR accelerator program that develops implementation guides for value-based care data exchange between payers, providers, and other healthcare stakeholders.

A Da Vinci FHIR Implementation Guide that collects required prior authorization documentation at the point of care using payer-defined FHIR Questionnaires, automatically pre-populated with data from the provider's EHR via CQL queries.

A mechanism in FHIR that allows additional data elements to be added to any resource beyond its base definition, enabling flexibility while maintaining interoperability.

Acronym for: Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources

An open standard for exchanging healthcare data electronically using modern RESTful APIs, developed by HL7 International.

Acronym for: Health Level Seven International

An international standards development organization dedicated to creating frameworks and standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information.

The dominant healthcare messaging standard for the past four decades, using pipe-delimited text segments to exchange clinical and administrative data between hospital systems in real time.

Acronym for: International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision

A global health information standard for diagnostic health data maintained by the World Health Organization, used for mortality and morbidity statistics, reimbursement, and clinical purposes.

A published specification that defines how FHIR should be used for a particular use case, jurisdiction, or program — combining profiles, extensions, value sets, and narrative guidance into a deployable conformance package.

Practices that are likely to interfere with, prevent, or materially discourage access, exchange, or use of electronic health information, as defined by the 21st Century Cures Act.

Acronym for: Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes

A universal standard for identifying medical laboratory observations, clinical measurements, and diagnostic study results to enable interoperability in healthcare.

A special type of FHIR extension that changes or qualifies the meaning of the element it is attached to, requiring receivers to understand and handle it before they can safely use the resource.

An online self-assessment tool that enables UK healthcare organizations to measure and publish their compliance with data security and information governance requirements.

Acronym for: National Institute for Health and Care Excellence

An executive non-departmental public body of the UK Department of Health that provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care.

A core FHIR resource that represents a measurement, assessment, or finding about a patient — including laboratory results, vital signs, clinical findings, and survey responses.

Acronym for: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

A division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that coordinates nationwide efforts to implement and use health information technology and health information exchange.

A Da Vinci FHIR Implementation Guide that replaces fax-based prior authorization submission with a structured FHIR Claim exchange: a provider submits a preauthorization Claim to the payer's PAS endpoint and receives a real-time or pended ClaimResponse with the authorization decision.

A payer requirement that a provider obtain approval before delivering a specific service, medication, or procedure in order for the cost to be covered under a patient's health insurance plan.

A set of constraints and extensions on a FHIR base resource that defines how it should be used in a specific context or jurisdiction to ensure consistent data exchange.

A modular unit of healthcare data in FHIR that represents a single concept such as a patient, observation, medication, or procedure, exchanged via RESTful APIs.

The HTTP-based interaction model FHIR uses to read, create, update, and delete resources — defining standard endpoints, methods, and response conventions that FHIR servers must implement.

A standardized nomenclature for clinical drugs and drug delivery devices produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine to enable interoperable medication information exchange.

An open authorization framework that defines how apps can securely request access to FHIR data on behalf of a patient or clinician, combining OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect with FHIR API conventions.

Acronym for: Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms

A comprehensive, multilingual clinical terminology system that provides standardized codes for clinical documentation, decision support, and health data exchange worldwide.

A FHIR resource that defines the structure, constraints, and extensions of another resource, data type, or extension — the formal machine-readable specification behind every FHIR profile.

A specialized FHIR server that manages, expands, and validates coded terminology — providing lookup, expansion, and validation operations for code systems and value sets used in FHIR implementations.

The HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide that defines the minimum set of FHIR profiles, extensions, and terminology bindings required for interoperable health data exchange in the United States.

Acronym for: United States Core Data for Interoperability

A standardized set of health data classes and constituent data elements required for nationwide, interoperable health information exchange in the United States.

A FHIR resource that specifies a set of codes drawn from one or more code systems, used to constrain which coded values are valid for a particular element in a resource or profile.