Why use FHIR for your healthcare solution?

Healthcare systems don’t talk to each other well — and that’s a massive innovation gap. FHIR is the standard that makes health data structured, interoperable, and ready for integration.

FHIR stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, a universal standard created by HL7 International to let different medical computer systems share health data quickly and securely.

Use FHIR if you want to:

• Build apps that integrate with EHR-style data models
• Normalize messy healthcare data into a standard format
• Exchange patient, observation, medication, or encounter data
• Design solutions that could realistically plug into hospitals
• Ensure your idea aligns with industry interoperability standards

If your idea involves structured clinical data, system integration, or scalable healthcare infrastructure — start with FHIR.

You will gain access to the InterSystems IRIS data platform, which provides a fully integrated FHIR Server with seamless support for healthcare interoperability. Easily store, search, and exchange FHIR resources while leveraging the power of FHIRPath, SQL, and RESTful APIs for efficient data access and management.

With InterSystems IRIS for Health, you can ingest, transform, and integrate healthcare data from various formats (HL7v2, CDA, DICOM, X12, and more) into FHIR while ensuring compliance with industry standards.

Why use Vector Search for your healthcare solution?

Healthcare data is messy, unstructured, and full of nuance — clinical notes, discharge summaries, trial criteria, research papers, patient messages. Use Vector Search if you want to:

• Build a clinical AI assistant grounded in real patient data
• Search across unstructured notes, PDFs, or guidelines semantically
• Match patients to trials based on meaning, not exact wording
• Create RAG applications that reason over healthcare knowledge
• Surface similar cases, symptoms, or outcomes instantly

If your idea involves natural language, similarity, recommendations, or AI-powered insights — Vector Search is your foundation.

You will gain access to the InterSystems IRIS data platform, which now supports Vector Search. Use Python / SQL / Langchain / Llamaindex to easily search your data with the power of embedding models, and build RAG on your data.

InterSystems IRIS Vector Search is our new vector store feature within the IRIS Data Platform. But we're not a "vector database" just like we're not a "string database" or "integer database" -- embedding vectors are just another SQL datatype for us!

InterSystems IRIS data platform gives you the tools to seamlessly integrate GenAI, tabular AutoML, data interoperability, using simple SQL or Python LangChain/Llamaindex connectors.

Our Hackathon Kit includes step-by-step Python-based tutorials for building AI agents that work with data in InterSystems IRIS for Health, and for building MCP servers that make IRIS data and functionality available to AI agents.

Go to the tutorials:

• Creating AI Agents
• Building MCP Servers

Each participating hospital will provide datasets for its challenges where needed, which you can easily load into the provided InterSystems IRIS kit and start using right away.

For challenges from VZP (the General Health Insurance Company of the Czech Republic), VZP will provide the datasets and technology stack in its Azure cloud environment. InterSystems IRIS instances will also be made available in the same environment in cooperation with the Azure team, allowing participants to combine VZP challenges with the InterSystems challenge.

You can also create synthetic FHIR healthcare data using Synthea. This is a standard way to generate realistic-looking healthcare data without using or exposing any personal information. Check out this repo and follow the steps provided to generate the data:

GitHub Repo: How to Create Synthetic FHIR data

▶ Innovation

▶ Real-world impact

▶ Use of InterSystems technology

▶ Technical coherence

We are looking for: a clearly defined healthcare problem; smart use of AI (such as vector search, agentic approaches, or machine learning) and/or HL7® FHIR®; a well-designed data model and system architecture; a realistic path to an MVP or startup; and a clear explanation of the solution’s impact.

Video: FHIR + AI Hackathon Kit Walkthrough
YouTube Shorts: What Is FHIR? A Simple Guide to Healthcare Data Exchange 1 min
Video: The Concept of FHIR: A Healthcare Data Standard Designed for the Future 23:11 min
Video: What is the HL7 FHIR Specification 15 min

Video: What is RAG? (Retrieval Augmented Generation) 11 min
Video: MCP Explained: Bridging the Gap between AI Agents and Tools 9 min
Video: How to Use AI for Patient Portals 11 min
Video: Different Types of AI Simply Explained 8 min