Making Science Computable Using Evidence-Based Medicine on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources: Standards Development Project

Background: Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has the potential to improve health outcomes, but EBM has not been widely integrated into the systems used for research or clinical decision-making. There has not been a scalable and reusable computer-readable standard for distributing research results and synthesized evidence among creators, implementers, and the ultimate users of that evidence. Evidence that is more rapidly updated, synthesized, disseminated, and implemented would improve
both the delivery of EBM and evidence-based health care policy.
Objective: This study aimed to introduce the EBM on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) project (EBMonFHIR), which is extending the methods and infrastructure of Health Level Seven (HL7) FHIR to provide an interoperability standard for the electronic exchange of health-related scientific knowledge.
Methods: As an ongoing process, the project creates and refines FHIR resources to represent evidence from clinical studies and syntheses of those studies and develops tools to assist with the creation and visualization of FHIR resources.
Results: The EBMonFHIR project created FHIR resources (ie, ArtifactAssessment, Citation, Evidence, EvidenceReport, and EvidenceVariable) for representing evidence. The COVID-19 Knowledge Accelerator (COKA) project, now Health Evidence Knowledge Accelerator (HEvKA) took this work further and created FHIR resources that express EvidenceReport, Citation, and ArtifactAssessment concepts. The group is (1) continually refining FHIR resources to support the representation of EBM; (2) developing controlled terminology related to EBM (i.e., study design, statistic type, statistical model, and risk of bias); and (3) developing tools to facilitate the visualization and data entry of EBM information into FHIR resources, including human-readable interfaces and JSON viewers.