While health interoperability may have once been the purview of the knowledgeable few – after all, understanding legacy health systems often required years of training and expertise – it is now part of the zeitgeist of the wider health industry and is fast becoming accessible to a broader audience. Standards developers, clinicians, patients and entrepreneurs alike now contribute their insights and perspectives towards one shared goal: a world where every individual has secure, timely, and appropriate access to accurate health information, empowering them, their care teams, and communities to make informed decisions anytime, anywhere.
When speaking to those who work with HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) on a daily basis, a common theme emerges: we are on the cusp of something special. That ‘something special’ feels like the pivotal moment Geoffrey Moore describes in Crossing the Chasm, when a technology moves beyond its early adopters and starts winning over a mainstream audience.
In health interoperability, the “chasm” refers to the gulf that separates pilot projects, where a handful of pioneering organizations demonstrate FHIR’s potential, from the widespread, everyday use required to make health interoperability a reality. As long as most providers, labs, payers and digital health apps remain on the far side of that gap, patient information stays fragmented in data silos. Clinicians must rely on incomplete histories, duplicate tests, or faxed records, and care plans are too often made without the full picture of medications, allergies or prior results. These blind spots increase the risk of medication errors, slow diagnoses, undermine care coordination and frustrate patients who expect their data to follow them. Crossing the chasm, therefore, isn’t just a business milestone for health IT vendors. It directly determines whether patients receive safer, timelier, and more personalized care.
As Moore describes, early adopters are visionary organizations willing to experiment with a promising technology before a proven return on investment (ROI) exists. Their pilot projects, success stories and evangelism supply the proof points that the more risk‑averse ‘early majority’ needs. The HL7 community dove into FHIR while it was still in the Draft Standard for Trial Use (DSTU) phase, discussing the future of the nascent standard, hosting early Connectathons, and publishing open-source tools before FHIR began to be considered a serious option in healthcare data exchange.
Now, the groundwork laid by those early adopters is bearing fruit. FHIR is now benefiting from the exact foundation now set in motion: healthcare innovators and forward-thinking vendors have created a critical mass of reference implementations, regulatory endorsements and vendor support. Those signals have closed the credibility gap, so mainstream healthcare systems now see FHIR not as an experiment but as the default standard for data exchange.
The moment for FHIR is now. With the chasm firmly behind us and a robust ecosystem of implementations, policy levers, and proven clinical value ahead, the question is no longer if organizations should adopt FHIR but how quickly they can leverage it to unlock better care and smarter operations. Newcomers to both HL7 International and FHIR often ask me, “Which organizations are currently using FHIR?” My reply is always as follows: ‘It’d be easier to tell you at this point which organizations aren’t using FHIR.” From EHR giants and national health systems to YC start-ups, payers, big tech companies, and even retail pharmacies, FHIR now underpins everything from appointment scheduling and patient-facing apps to AI-powered clinical decision support. The real differentiator is no longer basic conformance and/or compliance; it is now the speed with which an organization can weave FHIR into new service lines, analytics pipelines and partnerships. Those who move first gain untold advantages: richer data, lower integration costs, and most critically, the trust of patients who expect their health information to be readily accessible in this digital age.
Healthcare stakeholders who step forward today will shape the next generation of patient‑centered innovation, while those who wait risk falling irretrievably behind. By building on the hard-won momentum of the HL7 community, the wider health industry can turn FHIR into the everyday language of health data exchange, fulfilling the promise of secure, timely, and accurate health information.
