Two terms appear all over our work — FHIR and CodeX. They are central to what we build, but outside of health-IT circles, almost no one has heard of them. This is a plain-language explanation of what they are and why they matter for patients.
Our company is named Intersect on FHIR. We are members of HL7 CodeX. If those two words mean nothing to you, you are in good company — even within healthcare, they are not widely understood. But the ideas behind them are simple, and they sit at the heart of one of the most important problems in modern medicine: getting a patient’s health information to move safely and usefully from one place to another. Let me explain both, without the jargon.
First, the problem they solve
Imagine your medical history lives in a dozen different filing cabinets — one at your primary care office, one at the hospital, one at the lab, one at the cardiologist, one in a wearable device on your wrist. Each cabinet is locked, and each one organizes its files differently. When you show up at a new clinic, the staff often cannot open the other cabinets at all. At best, someone faxes over a stack of paper that a nurse re-types by hand.
That is, more or less, the actual state of health data. The information exists, but it is trapped in incompatible systems that do not speak the same language. The cost is not just inconvenience — it is repeated tests, dangerous gaps, delays in care, and clinicians making decisions without the full picture. Solving this is called interoperability: the ability of different systems to exchange information and actually use it.
What is FHIR?
FHIR (pronounced “fire”) stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. It is a modern, open standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically, created and maintained by a non-profit standards organization called HL7 (Health Level Seven International).
In plain terms, FHIR is a common language for health data. It defines a standard way to describe the basic building blocks of medical information — a patient, a lab result, a medication, a diagnosis, an observation from a device — so that any system built to the standard can understand data from any other. Each building block is called a “resource,” which is where the “R” in FHIR comes from.
Before standardized shipping containers, moving cargo between trucks, trains, and ships was slow and chaotic — everything had to be unpacked and repacked at each step. The shipping container changed global trade by giving everyone one agreed-upon box that fit every truck, crane, and ship. FHIR is the standardized container for health data. It does not change what is inside; it standardizes the box so the information can move anywhere without being repacked by hand.
What makes FHIR especially powerful is that it uses the same web technologies that run the rest of the modern internet. The same kind of plumbing that lets a weather app pull a forecast, or a banking app show your balance, lets a FHIR-based system request a patient’s records or send a new result. That is why FHIR has become the backbone of health-data exchange and is now built into the major electronic health record systems and required by federal interoperability rules.
A note on versions: why we build on R6
Like any standard, FHIR has evolved through versions. The most widely deployed version today is called R4. The newest is R6. We made a deliberate decision to build Intersect on FHIR R6 — the current frontier of the standard — rather than an older version, so that the platform is aligned with where healthcare interoperability is heading, not where it has been. That is a forward-looking bet, and it is the reason it is in our name.
What is CodeX?
If FHIR is the common language, CodeX is a community of organizations working together to put that language to use in the hardest areas of medicine. CodeX stands for Common Oncology Data Elements eXtensions, and it is what HL7 calls a “FHIR Accelerator” — a member-driven group that develops and tests real-world, FHIR-based data standards to solve specific clinical problems.
A quick clarification, because the name causes confusion: HL7 CodeX has nothing to do with the similarly named artificial-intelligence coding tool from a well-known AI company. They simply share a name. The CodeX we belong to is a healthcare standards community.
CodeX began at the end of 2019 in oncology, organized around a standard called mCODE (minimal Common Oncology Data Elements) — an agreed-upon, FHIR-based language for describing cancer data so it can be shared and reused across institutions. Having proven the approach in cancer care, the community has since expanded into two further domains: cardiovascular health and genomics.
The work is organized into “use cases” — focused projects that tackle a concrete problem, build a standard way to solve it, and test it with real and synthetic data. The members are not competitors fighting over territory; they are providers, technology companies, government bodies, patient advocates, and researchers collaborating on shared standards that lift the whole field. The guiding principle is elegant: collect a patient’s data once, and reuse it to power many different workflows.
Where Intersect fits
We are active CodeX members, contributing to the genomics community — including the molecular tumor board and pathogen genomics work — and to the prior-authorization-in-oncology effort. We participate for a simple reason: we believe the right way to build healthcare technology is to build it to the standards as they are written, alongside the people writing them, rather than inventing a private, proprietary approach that locks data away in yet another incompatible filing cabinet.
That conviction is the whole idea behind Intersect. By producing standards-native FHIR data and engaging in the standards community directly, we can carry advanced, specialty-grade care — precision oncology, genomics, cardiovascular care — out of major academic centers and into the community and rural settings that need it most, without the data getting trapped along the way. Standards are not a technical footnote. They are what make it possible for a patient’s information, and therefore their care, to travel to wherever they happen to live.
So when you see “on FHIR” in our name, now you know what it means: we built this on the common language of health data, on purpose, because that is what it takes to actually close the gaps.
See standards-native care in action
Explore how a FHIR R6-native platform delivers precision oncology, genomics, and connected care to the communities that need it. Take a look, or schedule a demonstration.