Competitors Collaborating on FHIR
Brendan Keeler, Senior PM at Zus Health, on building infrastructure for digital health
FHIR matters because it turns health record access from a custom integration project into a shared software layer that even bitter rivals have to support. Instead of writing one interface for Epic, another for Cerner, and a third for everyone else, developers can work with a common set of web objects like patient, medication, and lab result, then plug apps into many systems with far less custom work.
-
The standard comes out of HL7, the same industry body behind older messaging formats, but FHIR is built around reusable resources and modern web patterns. That is the practical shift behind calling it a JSON API standard instead of another hospital interface spec.
-
The competitors in the collaboration are the big record systems and their ecosystem partners. Epic and Oracle Health both expose FHIR based developer programs, because customers and regulators now expect third party apps to launch inside the EHR and pull chart data in a standard way.
-
This is why infrastructure companies like Zus exist. Even with a common standard, each health system still configures scopes, endpoints, and workflows differently. The opportunity is to smooth over those last mile differences so digital health apps can integrate once and deploy faster across many provider groups.
The next phase is less about whether FHIR wins, and more about who captures the value on top of it. As government rules force broader API availability and EHRs keep expanding in workflow app platforms, the winners will be the companies that turn a common data standard into faster implementation, better in app experiences, and repeatable distribution across fragmented health systems.