FHIR is a means of representing structured clinical data, one that "models the world of structured clinical data," according to Mandel, and contains more than 50 medical "structures," each defined by a set of data types.

This "restful API" draws in data with an HTTP "get" request, he explained. "This is a concrete data payload," Mandel said. "It can be understood by someone who's never read an HL7 standard," he said.

FHIR uses the OAuth standard for authenticating users, then builds a "clinical picture" based on specific data elements that individuals want to fetch from various repositories, Mandel said.

In a live demonstration before an overflow crowd in a too-small meeting room at the Washington Hilton., Mandel showed a pediatric growth chart in use at Boston Children's that has separate views for clinicians and parents.

McCallie said the Cerner pediatrics team was "floored" when they saw the parent view. "That's what happens with apps," he said.

A medication app currently in prototype stage can pull a patient's medication profile out of the Cerner Millennium EHR, McCallie said. It also can translate patient instructions into any of at least 17 languages and provide a printout in the patient's native language, not just English or Spanish. "This is another place where we can go deep and deliver something we haven't developed (at Cerner)," McCallie said.

This is in the pilot stage, though McCallie said it should be in production next year when HL7 officially publishes the specification profiles. This will lead to "friction reduction" by not having to argue over the API to use, he said.

Kenneth Mandl, MD, chair of biomedical informatics and population health at Boston Children's, said he connected with Cerner and with Utah's Intermountain Healthcare at HIMSS14, and saw they were using open APIs. He said he wants to have a SMART on FHIR demonstration at HIMSS15 in April using data from "real patients."

Mandl first conceptualized SMART in a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine essay he co-authored with colleague Isaac Kohane, MD.

Not all are ready to anoint SMART on FHIR the savior of health IT interoperability, though.

In an earlier session Tuesday that McCallie also was involved in, NextGen Healthcare Information Systems CMO Sarah Corley, MD, urged caution with FHIR, at least when it comes to including it in the upcoming meaningful use Stage 3 regulations. "FHIR is a draft standard," said Corley, who also serves as vice chair of the HIMSS EHR Association. "We don't want to require something before its time."