Microsoft Healthcare’s FHIR Server for Azure, open source project—based on HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard, provides support infrastructure for “immediate provisioning in the cloud including mapping to Azure Active Directory as well as the ability to enable role-based access controls,” according to the vendor.
Heather Jordan Cartwright, general manager of Microsoft Healthcare, made the announcement about the release of FHIR Server for Azure on Monday in a blog post.
“In almost every facet of healthcare, the ambition to create and deliver AI exceeds the tools available to deliver it—FHIR Server for Azure provides a foundation to address that problem,”
wrote Cartwright.
“Working with data in the FHIR format, developers can use the server to quickly ingest and manage FHIR datasets in a cloud environment, track and manage data access, and begin to normalize data for machine learning workloads.”
She added that this open source project will make it easier for organizations working with healthcare data to leverage the cloud for clinical data processing and machine learning workloads.
“In almost every facet of healthcare, the ambition to create and deliver AI exceeds the tools available to deliver it—FHIR Server for Azure provides a foundation to address that problem,” wrote Cartwright.
“Working with data in the FHIR format, developers can use the server to quickly ingest and manage FHIR datasets in a cloud environment, track and manage data access, and begin to normalize data for machine learning workloads.”
According to Cartwright, Microsoft’s initial release of FHIR Server for Azure supports FHIR Standard for Trial Use (STU) 3—the current version of the FHIR API.
“We have been actively engaged with HL7 and the FHIR community to support the standards development process for FHIR R4 and are excited about the forthcoming publication of FHIR R4,” she adds. “We plan to support FHIR R4 in a future version of FHIR Server for Azure, once the R4 specification has been finalized and published by HL7.”
You can read more about Microsoft’s release of FHIR Server for Azure here.
