Making Science Computable Using Evidence-Based Medicine on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources: Standards Development Project

Abstract

Background: Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has the potential to improve health outcomes, but EBM has not been widely integrated into the systems used for research or clinical decision making. There has not been a scalable and reusable computerreadable standard for distributing research results and synthesized evidence among creators, implementers, and the ultimate users of that evidence. Evidence that is more rapidly updated, synthesized, disseminated, and implemented would improve both the delivery of EBM and evidence-based health care policy Objective: To introduce the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) project (EBMonFHIR), which is extending the methods and infrastructure of Health Level Seven (HL7®) FHIR to provide an interoperability standard for electronic exchange of health-related scientific knowledge.Methods: As an ongoing process, the project creates and refines FHIR Resources to represent evidence from clinical studies and syntheses of those studies and develops tools to assist with the creation and visualization of FHIR Resources.