The following is a guest article by Shridhar Rajanna, Lead Business Analyst at TietoEvry
When the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) established Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) as the modern interoperability standard, it marked a turning point in U.S. healthcare data exchange. FHIR promised to make healthcare data more portable, accessible, and useful across electronic health record (EHR) systems. Yet, nearly a decade after its introduction, FHIR adoption remains uneven—largely due to implementation complexity, skill gaps, and cost barriers.
This is where low-code platforms can change the game. By abstracting away much of the technical heavy lifting, low-code tools enable healthcare organizations to build FHIR-compliant applications faster, with fewer resources, and with more collaboration between clinicians, analysts, and developers.
The Promise and Challenge of FHIR Implementation
FHIR is not just another data standard, it’s an enabler of innovation. It allows applications to access patient data through standardized APIs, paving the way for better care coordination, patient engagement, and analytics.
However, implementing FHIR APIs within legacy systems is often challenging. Many healthcare organizations face:
- Resource Constraints: Skilled FHIR developers and integration experts are expensive and scarce
- Complex Legacy Systems: Older EHRs weren’t built with interoperability in mind, requiring extensive middleware and mapping work
- Regulatory Pressure: With the 21st Century Cures Act mandating patient access to health data, compliance timelines are tight
Traditional software development cycles months of coding, testing, and deployment—simply don’t align with the urgency and scale of interoperability goals.
Enter Low-Code: A New Approach to FHIR Enablement
Low-code platforms allow users to build applications using drag-and-drop interfaces, visual logic, and prebuilt components. For healthcare organizations, this approach can significantly accelerate FHIR adoption in several key ways:
Rapid Prototyping and Deployment
Low-code platforms allow teams to quickly design, test, and deploy FHIR-based workflows without writing extensive code. Instead of waiting months for custom integration, a hospital’s IT team can build a proof-of-concept FHIR API connection in days.
For example, a low-code platform can enable a clinical data analyst (with limited coding skills) to create a patient summary dashboard using FHIR resources from multiple EHRs, helping clinicians visualize medication lists, lab results, and allergies in one unified view.
Bridging Technical Skill Gaps
Healthcare IT teams are often multidisciplinary, but not everyone is a seasoned software engineer. Low code democratizes FHIR development by enabling business analysts, clinicians, and data specialists to participate in solution design.
This collaborative model not only reduces dependency on external vendors but also enhances the clinical relevance of applications. The result: solutions that are both technically sound and operationally meaningful.
Prebuilt FHIR Components and Connectors
Modern low-code platforms increasingly include prebuilt FHIR connectors, APIs, and templates that handle common interoperability tasks such as patient resource retrieval or encounter mapping.
These reusable components drastically reduce development time and ensure compliance with ONC and HL7 specifications. In addition, they simplify integration with popular EHR systems like Epic, Cerner, and Allscripts.
Agility in Compliance and Governance
FHIR standards evolve, and healthcare regulations frequently change. Low-code environments offer agility organizations can update apps and APIs quickly without undergoing massive reengineering efforts.
Moreover, built-in governance features (version control, access permissions, and audit trails) ensure compliance while maintaining innovation velocity.
Lower Cost and Faster ROI
Traditional FHIR integrations can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and testing. Low code significantly cuts these costs by reducing developer hours, streamlining QA, and accelerating delivery cycles.
This means hospitals, payers, and digital health startups can innovate faster—allocating more resources to patient outcomes and less to backend infrastructure.
A Real-World Example: Low-Code in Action
Consider a U.S. healthcare startup building a SMART on FHIR app to visualize patient medication adherence. Traditionally, the process would require custom API development, testing on multiple EHR sandboxes, and weeks of coding.
With a low-code FHIR builder, the same app can be created using prebuilt components FHIR Patient and Medication Request resources, OAuth 2.0 authorization modules, and responsive UI templates.
The result? The team delivers a functional prototype in less than two weeks, gathers user feedback early, and deploys a production-ready version within two months, all while maintaining HL7 compliance and security standards.
Such acceleration isn’t just about speed it’s about unlocking innovation. The faster healthcare innovators can build and test ideas, the faster patients and providers can benefit.
The Future: FHIR for Everyone
As the U.S. healthcare system continues to prioritize interoperability, the ability to rapidly develop and scale FHIR-based solutions will be a competitive differentiator. Low-code platforms don’t just make this possible they make it sustainable.
Imagine a future where hospital IT teams routinely spin up FHIR-connected apps to improve patient engagement, care coordination, and analytics without waiting for six-month dev cycles. That’s the vision low-code enables.
FHIR adoption shouldn’t be limited to tech giants and well-funded health systems. With the right low-code platform, even small clinics, payers, and startups can become part of the interoperability movement, driving innovation from the ground up.
Conclusion
Low-code platforms are not a silver bullet, but they represent a powerful bridge between healthcare’s technical ambitions and its practical realities. By reducing complexity, empowering multidisciplinary teams, and accelerating time to market, low-code technology can make FHIR adoption faster, broader, and more impactful across U.S. healthcare.
As interoperability becomes not just a regulatory requirement but a competitive advantage, low-code platforms will play a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of connected healthcare.
About Shridhar Rajanna
Shridhar Rajanna is a U.S. healthcare business analyst with over a decade of experience in interoperability, FHIR standards, and digital transformation. He is passionate about using low-code and AI technologies to bridge the gap between data and decision-making in modern healthcare.
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