Abstract
Data and interoperability standards are the virtually ubiquitous plumbing that underlie most contemporary health informatics systems and tools. We’ve already gotten a glimpse of that when we encountered LOINC codes in the lab test HL7 v2 message.
Given the complexity of health care, it should not be surprising that this is a complicated topic, so we will divide it into three chapters. In this initial chapter, we will first discuss the evolution of standards and then we will focus on standards for representing health data. In the next chapter, we will discuss how that data is packaged, transported, and shared using interoperability standards developed before FHIR. In the third chapter, we will cover FHIR in some detail.