Skip to content
Skip to main content

New to FHIR?

This page provides a brief introduction to FHIR for those who are new to it or have limited experience with the standard.

What is FHIR?

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is an international standard developed by HL7 International for the exchange of healthcare information. FHIR defines a set of resources — building blocks that represent common healthcare concepts such as a Patient, an Observation, a Medication or an Appointment.

FHIR is designed to be:

  • Web-friendly — resources are exchanged using standard web technologies (HTTP, JSON, XML).
  • Modular — you combine resources to represent complex healthcare scenarios.
  • Extensible — base resources can be profiled and extended to fit local requirements.

Key concepts

Term Description
Resource A discrete unit of interoperable information, e.g. Patient, Observation, MedicationRequest.
Profile A set of constraints applied to a base resource to fit a specific use case or national context.
Implementation Guide (IG) A collection of profiles, extensions, value sets and narrative documentation for a specific standard or domain.
Extension An additional data element added to a resource beyond what is in the base FHIR specification.
ValueSet / CodeSystem Defines the coded values (terminology) that can be used in a given field.
CapabilityStatement Describes what a FHIR server or client supports — which resources, interactions and search parameters.

How Inera authors Implementation Guides

Inera authors FHIR Implementation Guides using FHIR Shorthand (FSH) and the FHIR IG Publisher. This toolchain is the HL7-recommended way to produce IGs and is used by national programmes worldwide.

FHIR Shorthand (FSH)

FHIR Shorthand is a domain-specific language designed specifically for defining FHIR profiles, extensions, value sets and examples. It is compact and human-readable, making it much easier to author and review than raw JSON or XML StructureDefinitions.

A simple FSH profile looks like this:

Profile: IneraPatient
Parent: Patient
Id: inera-patient
Title: "Inera Patient"
Description: "Patient profile adapted for Swedish national services."

* identifier 1..* MS
* identifier ^slicing.discriminator.type = #pattern
* identifier ^slicing.discriminator.path = "system"
* identifier ^slicing.rules = #open

Learn FSH at FSH School — an interactive online course that walks you through the FSH language from basics to advanced profiling, with live exercises directly in the browser.

IG Publisher and IG Builder

The FHIR IG Publisher is the official HL7 tool that takes FSH source files and produces a complete, publishable Implementation Guide website — including rendered profiles, examples, validation, and a navigable HTML site.

The IG Builder guidance on build.fhir.org covers everything you need to know about setting up and running an IG project:

  • Project folder structure and sushi-config.yaml
  • Running SUSHI (the FSH compiler) and the IG Publisher
  • Configuring pages, menus and narrative content
  • Publishing and CI/CD pipelines

The continuous integration server at build.fhir.org automatically builds every IG hosted on GitHub and makes a live preview available — Inera uses this for pre-release review of IGs before they are formally published.

How to read an Implementation Guide

Inera's Implementation Guides are published at fhir.inera.se following the URL pattern https://fhir.inera.se/ig/<name>/ — for example fhir.inera.se/ig/core/. Each IG is structured as follows:

  1. Introduction — describes the purpose and scope of the standard.
  2. Profiles — lists the FHIR resource profiles defined in the IG, with constraints and cardinalities.
  3. Extensions — lists any custom extensions introduced.
  4. Terminology — lists the ValueSets and CodeSystems used.
  5. Examples — shows concrete example FHIR resources conforming to the profiles.
  6. CapabilityStatements — describes what implementers must support.

Start with the Introduction and Use cases before diving into the profiles. Understanding the clinical and business context makes it much easier to interpret the technical constraints.

Useful external resources

Questions?

If you have questions about Inera's FHIR work, contact us at fhir@inera.se.