The Power of Impact: Celebrating Real-World FHIR Implementations

FHIR DevDays has always been a space for deep technical dives, bold prototypes, and standards innovation. But as the global FHIR community matures, so does our focus. This year, we’re celebrating something even more meaningful: real-world impact. 

This year, we’re excited to introduce the FHIR Impact Showcase—a new DevDays session with a simple goal: shining a spotlight on the real-world implementations where FHIR is making a tangible difference. These are not just proof-of-concepts or pilots. These are projects delivering measurable improvements in care, access, and outcomes for clinicians, patients, and healthcare systems across the world. 

At the recent HL7 Connectathon in Madrid, I was once again reminded just how many of these projects are quietly changing healthcare around the world. Not all of them fit neatly into a showcase, or even make it onto our radar—but they are out there. And the submissions we received for the Impact Showcase are a powerful cross-section of that broader wave of progress.

Spotlight on Submissions: How FHIR is Changing Healthcare

Happy Together Notes

🌍 Region: Global  

It might sound simple—enabling collaborative note-taking in Epic using FHIR—but anyone who has worked in a clinical setting knows just how crucial these notes are for understanding their patients’ care.

“Happy Notes Together” is a great example of how thoughtful integration can improve workflows and ultimately lead to better care coordination. It’s a reminder that impact isn’t always about scale—it’s about relevance.  

• Problem: Clinicians often lack access to complete patient documentation across health systems.
• Solution: Epic’s Happy Together Notes allows users to view and collaborate on external clinical notes using FHIR DocumentReference.
• Impact: Already live in 350+ health systems worldwide, this feature improves continuity of care and reduces documentation fragmentation.
• FHIR in Action: FHIR DocumentReference and Binary resources enable structured, interoperable access to clinician notes from other providers.

Sparked – Australia’s FHIR Accelerator  

🌏 Region: Australia

Not every impactful project is a front-line implementation—some build the foundation that others rely on. Sparked, led by CSIRO, is Australia’s national FHIR Accelerator focused on building a strong, connected FHIR ecosystem that supports innovation across the country by enabling consistency, capability, and community.

• Problem: Fragmented FHIR adoption and limited national alignment were slowing progress.
• Solution: Sparked provides a national framework to harmonize FHIR standards, offer conformance testing, and support implementers through capability-building efforts.
• Impact: Sparked has unified previously siloed efforts with vendors representing over 80% market share adopting AU Core, enabling smarter procurement, faster onboarding, and more consistent national interoperability.
• FHIR in Action: Central to the strategy—FHIR is the foundation for implementation guides, APIs, testing tools, and community collaboration.

Patient equity analytics

🌎 Region: United States  

Health equity can’t be improved without first being understood. This project, a collaboration between Verto Inc. and Telluride Regional Medical Center, uses FHIR-powered analytics to reveal care disparities and support targeted interventions. 

• Problem: Health disparities often go unmeasured and unaddressed due to fragmented, unstructured data and limited analytical tools.
• Solution: Structured FHIR-based analysis of clinical and demographic data to assess equity gaps in patient care.
• Impact: Equips local providers with insight into how care is delivered and to whom—supporting targeted outreach and intervention strategies, and lowering costs.
• FHIR in Action: FHIR serves as the underlying data model, allowing for standardized, comparable datasets across patient populations.

A 100% FHIR EMR   

🌎 Region: Global  

In many healthcare settings, providers have been limited by vendor lock-in and outdated digital tools with clinicians still relying on paper-based records. 

Beda EMR aims to change that by offering an open-source, FHIR-native electronic medical record (EMR) that’s modular and easy to implement. 

• Problem: Traditional EMRs can be closed, proprietary, hard to extend, and lack full FHIR support.
• Solution: A fully open-source, vendor-neutral, FHIR-native EMR that is designed to be customizable, interoperable, and open.
• Impact: By reducing barriers to adoption, Beda EMR is enabling digital transformation in research centers, clinics, and hospitals that would otherwise be left behind. 
• FHIR in Action: FHIR is not just the API—it’s the internal data model, ensuring native interoperability and future-proof scalability.

CoZo SHIFT: Providing access to allergy information and patient-related problems  

🌎 Region: Belgium  

CoZo SHIFT represents a promising evolution in regional health information sharing. Built on an existing and trusted platform in Belgium, the project is moving from static documents and local standards to a dynamic, real-time exchange of structured health data using FHIR. 

Though still in the early stages, it showcases how established networks can adapt and modernize to better serve both clinicians and patients. 

• Problem: Critical allergy and patient history data were buried in PDFs, limiting timely access and searchability.
• Solution: CoZo SHIFT is evolving the existing CoZo network into a FHIR-powered architecture that supports real-time data flows and improved integration.
• Impact: The shift to structured data is expected to save clinicians time (5–15 minutes per query), speed up decision-making, and reduce the risk of medical errors. It also sets the stage for future use cases, like sharing lab results and vital signs in a consistent format.
• FHIR in Action: FHIR is used to modernize the technical backbone—enabling structured, API-based access to patient data and greater system flexibility.

Every Contribution Counts

One thing stood out across all submissions: impact isn’t about awards—it’s about solving real problems for real people. That’s why, this year, we chose not to name a winner. Instead, we celebrate all projects that are making a difference.

Whether it’s a note-sharing tool, a national accelerator, or an open-source EMR—every FHIR implementation that delivers value deserves recognition. Each one is a story of commitment, collaboration, and care.  

Note that the projects listed above are just a selection. Additional implementations will be presented on stage at FHIR DevDays—don’t miss the FHIR Impact Showcase on Friday, June 6 at DevDays 2025. Join us in celebrating these efforts and the community behind them. 

Let’s keep making healthcare better—together, with FHIR.