Healthcare data doesn’t live in one place. It moves — between providers, systems, and care settings. If you’re building custom healthcare software, you’ll need to connect to the rest of the healthcare ecosystem — and that means working with standards like HL7, FHIR, and modern APIs.

These aren’t just technical acronyms. They shape how your software can communicate, integrate, and scale. Here’s what you need to know.

What Is HL7?

HL7 (Health Level Seven) is a set of standards for how healthcare systems exchange data — things like lab results, patient demographics, and medical history.

Older HL7 standards (like v2) are still widely used in hospitals and clinics today. They’re built for legacy systems and often use flat file formats. While not as modern or flexible as newer approaches, HL7 v2 is critical when integrating with many existing EHRs.

If your custom platform needs to pull or push data to a hospital system, you’ll probably need to work with HL7.

What Is FHIR?

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a newer standard developed by the same HL7 organization — but built for the web.

FHIR uses modern formats like JSON and XML, and communicates over RESTful APIs. That makes it easier for custom software to interact with EHRs, patient portals, and health apps without clunky, outdated interfaces.

FHIR is also modular. It breaks healthcare data into “resources” — like Patient, Observation, Encounter — which can be requested and updated individually. This makes integration cleaner and more targeted.

How Do APIs Fit In?

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the mechanisms that allow software systems to talk to each other.

When a healthcare organization offers a FHIR API, it means your custom application can connect directly to their data — securely, with structure, and in real time. No file transfers. No batch uploads. Just live, authenticated data exchange.

APIs aren’t unique to healthcare — but using healthcare-specific APIs built on FHIR or HL7 is essential when working with EHRs or other clinical systems.

Why It Matters in Custom Development

Custom healthcare platforms are only as useful as their ability to integrate. If your software can’t communicate with the rest of the provider’s tools, it becomes another silo.

By building on standards like HL7 and FHIR — and planning for secure API integration from the start — you create a solution that:

  • Reduces manual data entry

  • Improves clinical workflows

  • Supports compliance and auditability

  • Scales more easily as needs evolve

At Decision Point Software, we help healthcare clients navigate this complexity — designing systems that speak the right “language” and connect to the right endpoints.

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If you’re planning a custom healthcare platform, we can help you design it with integration in mind — using HL7, FHIR, and secure APIs to ensure your software fits into the healthcare ecosystem, not outside of it.

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