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What is FHIR, and when would you still be dealing with HL7 v2?

5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15

Answer

Short answer

FHIR is a resource-oriented REST API with a defined set of resources, constrained for real use by profiles and implementation guides. HL7 v2 is the older pipe-delimited messaging standard that still carries most of the event traffic inside hospitals, so the two coexist and an integration engine translates between them.

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