Microsoft Azure has another distinction to its name! In an effort to aid healthcare research, the cloud platform has become the first to support the FHIR format natively.
The Azure API for FHIR is now available for everyone, letting developers and researchers manage healthcare data and quickly provision an enterprise-grade service. It also supports several compliance standards — including all the big ones like ISO 27001:2013, HIPAA, and GDPR.
FHIR, of course, standing for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources.
Redmond detailed this advancement in a blog post, confirming that the solution has now graduated to general availability.
Heather Jordan Cartwright, general manager, Microsoft Healthcare:
“Microsoft understands the unique value FHIR offers to enable management of Protected Health Information (PHI) in the cloud, so we’re advancing Azure technology to enable our health customers the ability to ingest, manage, and persist PHI data across the Azure environment in the native FHIR format.”
This new API has been crafted for developers, researchers, as well as device makers, and the platform enables improved testing of AI, digital services, and cross-hospital collaboration.
The software titan said that the goal was to craft a new PaaS to put the focus on development rather than resources and technology. And to that end, this new arrival lets anyone working with FHIR health data to start securely managing PHI data in Azure in just a few minutes.
Microsoft promises that users can set up an enterprise-grade FHIR service practically instantly with the native integration, and they will also get role-based access control and audit log tracking.
The service also sports multi-region failover to ensure data protection, along with SMART on FHIR functionality.
Solid stuff.
