HL7 says the industry needs a million more FHIR engineers. Most companies don't have five.
HL7 International, the organization behind the FHIR standard, launched a new talent program this week aimed at a problem most MedTech companies feel directly but rarely see written down: there simply aren't enough people who know how to build FHIR integrations properly. The program, called Break the Code, is a free global initiative giving students hands-on experience building FHIR applications, starting this October in partnership with CAHIIM. Behind the announcement is a number worth sitting with: HL7's own workforce analysis estimates the global healthcare ecosystem could need more than 1 million additional skilled FHIR workers over the next five years.
Why this shortage matters more than it sounds
A talent gap in a niche technical standard might sound like an abstract industry problem. For a MedTech company trying to connect its product to European hospital and EHR systems, it is a direct constraint on how fast that integration can happen and how much it costs.
FHIR is not a plug-and-play format. It is a framework with room for local interpretation, which means a hospital in Germany and a hospital in the Netherlands can both be "FHIR-compliant" while expecting data shaped differently. Getting that right requires people who understand both the standard and the specific hospital system on the other end, and those people are, by HL7's own numbers, in increasingly short supply.
What this means for a product roadmap
Companies planning to hire their way through a FHIR integration are competing for a shrinking pool of specialists against every other health tech company with the same plan. A training pipeline that starts this October will help over the next five years. It does not help a team with a hospital go-live date next spring.
For teams in that position, the practical alternative is not to wait for the talent market to catch up, but to bring in FHIR expertise as a defined, time-boxed engagement rather than a permanent hire that may take months to find.
We're already doing our part on the talent side
Initiatives like HL7's are exactly the kind of long-term fix the industry needs, and it's a space we've been quietly active in ourselves. Thaumatec has an ongoing partnership with Politechnika Wrocławska, sponsoring student projects through KPZ and mentoring students directly, and we've hosted knowledge-sharing sessions with student groups like Koło Naukowe Estymator. Growing the next generation of engineers who understand healthcare software, FHIR included, is not something that happens only at the HL7 level. It happens at the university level too.
Where this connects to how we work
That is also the gap our FHIR Integration Fast-Start is built to close in the near term: an architecture blueprint mapping exactly which FHIR resources a product needs to expose or consume, followed by a working Sprint 0 connection to a real EU hospital or EHR system, built early enough that any mismatch between the blueprint and reality shows up in weeks rather than months before go-live.
HL7's talent program is a genuinely good long-term fix, and one we're glad to see more of. For companies with a nearer-term deadline, the more immediate answer is getting the integration right the first time, with people who already have the FHIR experience the industry is short on.
Find out more: thaumatec.com/accelerators/fhir