This week saw international standards body HL7 celebrate the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the FHIR specification, which has since become one of most widely used standards in the world for healthcare interoperability. Created by Victorian Grahame Grieve and now adopted by any global health software company worth its salt, FHIR is widely touted as nothing short of a revolution in health IT.

We remember doing some of the first reporting on FHIR back in the early days, when we were alerted to the concept by former chair of HL7 Australia Klaus Veil. Klaus told us back in 2012 that FHIR was “the latest trending interoperability technology that has taken the eHealth world by storm”, and he was right. The promise was that it would be faster, easier and far more comprehensible than standards like HL7 v3, which got so bogged down in its own complexity that it was pretty much dropped.