fire or fast Health Care interoperability resources is a healthcare data standard created by hl7 International to meet the interoperability needs of the current Healthcare data environment over the past few decades more and more systems need to be connected so a data standard of this kind has become essential in fact compatibility with the fire standard is now federally mandated for healthcare I.T systems in many countries with data now stored in many places such as pharmacies home devices and mobile devices interoperability and the fire standard make it possible to see all this data in one place in real time fire was designed with key considerations in mind including the need to move data from offline to online as well as data transparency requirements as a standard fire can also handle both narrative and coded data to put it simply fire is a representational state or rest API fire encompasses the specification for requesting and receiving data as well as an agreement on the meaning of the data in healthcare let's take a look at the elements that make up fire first fire resources are logically discrete data Concepts such as a patient medication or document which have a defined meaning and a known location on a server A Fire Resource includes all the data elements necessary to define the data concept for example the patient resource includes elements such as given name family name and birth date the fire specification also includes profiles which are implementations of clinical information models defined for specific use cases such as a procedure fire profiles exist for each resource required for the use case and they consist of all the necessary rules and relationships value sets and fire extensions we'll discuss fire extensions in more detail later by using shared profiles Healthcare applications can use fire across different interoperability paradigms without any transformation required data expressed as fire can be used in messages documents and rest apis since fire is machine readable it can also be used in services such as decision Support Services interoperability comes from using the same fire profiles in each system true interoperability comes from exchanging information and having the intended meeting come across while humans are very good at interpreting meaning computers can only understand exactly what the data says for example two people describing a zebra is either a white horse with black stripes or a black horse with white stripes would quickly figure out that these mean the same animal however these descriptions are completely different to a computer to ensure that the same descriptions are used across systems and Health Care a clinical information model must be used this includes the descriptions of healthcare data concepts for a particular use case rules of how the data is used vocabulary or terminology bindings and the relationships between data a fire profile is the implementation of a clinical information model to understand the importance of a profile consider a patient's medical history report from an EHR system that you print out and cut into individual data elements on one of these strips of paper is the phrase diabetes type 2. while we know what this phrase is the context is missing diabetes could be a condition the patient has a condition they used to have or even a condition their mother had based on family history fire profiles provide context by defining the relationships between data elements and resources the terminology binding in these profiles uses a fire terminology server which contains all of the codes and value sets needed for a fire profile the codes used for a particular element make up a value set all applications systems and operations using the profile can access the server ensuring that the same codes are used to refer to the same data elements within resources across systems the fire standard includes data elements that are used in 80 percent of systems but it also defines how to create a fire extension as part of a profile to represent data elements for a specific use case that are not already part of the standard for example a clinic that does medical tourism may want to record a patient's nationality which is not part of the standard patient resource they can simply extend the patient resource to add a nationality extension when fire extensions are created they are published to a publicly available URL meaning anyone who receives data that uses the extension can discover what it means finally when it comes to putting the fire standard into use for a specific purpose you can refer to fire implementation guides which contain the profile resources including extensions terminology bindings and value sets needed for a particular use case Beyond these technical details fire implementation guides provide documentation and examples of how they might be used these guides are published to a publicly available URL using a web publishing tool made by hl7 International as part of the fire specification since they are machine readable fire implementation guides can be used to validate fire applications developed by using them to learn more about the fire standard refer to the other content on the intersystems learning site