Bridging FHIR and Specialty Societies: Insights from CMSS 2025

Vermonster recently joined the Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC for the first time. It was an opportunity to bring our perspective on FHIR Clinical Reasoning directly into the specialty society community. We arrived curious about where societies are in their technical adoption journey. Are they familiar with FHIR? Are they thinking about clinical reasoning and computable guidance?

While awareness varies, one theme stood out. Societies are encountering the exact challenges FHIR Clinical Reasoning was created to address. Many are actively exploring technical solutions for faster, more consistent evidence adoption and improved quality across diverse clinical settings. Organizations are increasingly recognizing that this requires collaboration with technical partners who can translate clinical intent into operational, interoperable implementations.

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Learning Health Systems in Action

Medical specialty societies sit at the center of the learning health system, a model in which guidelines define best practice, measurement captures real world performance, and insights flow back into improving care and the evidence base. At CMSS, we saw societies working through each part of this loop and recognizing the need for technical infrastructure to make it work.

Nicole Thomas from the College of American Pathologists highlighted how societies are moving toward living guidelines, guidance continuously updated based on emerging evidence rather than revised every few years. These living guidelines prioritize high impact action statements requiring frequent updates. Societies are exploring structured content formats to speed iteration, but structured content alone doesn't solve adoption when guidance doesn't integrate with clinical workflows.

This is where executable guidance in FHIR becomes transformational. It delivers context aware recommendations at the point of care, supports rapid iteration as evidence changes, and directly connects evidence based guidelines to clinical decision making. Guidelines become dynamic tools supporting clinicians in the moment, whether a family physician navigating complex specialty care or an oncologist managing evolving therapeutics.

Emily Cahill's session on measuring time to pain management in the ED for sickle cell pain crisis illustrated the measurement side of this cycle. Delays in treatment prolong pain and may lead to serious complications. Her work demonstrated why societies need structured data standards to track whether guidelines are followed and where gaps exist. Like other presenters, she emphasized that effective quality measures require close collaboration between clinical leaders and technical experts who understand both clinical context and the systems where care happens.

Several society leaders described similar challenges with their clinical registries. These registries capture critical specialty specific data that flows back into quality measures and research, yet most remain in proprietary formats that don't align with the FHIR based measurement infrastructure payers and providers increasingly expect. As societies develop computable measures in FHIR, they face a disconnect: analytics and quality reporting require bridging conventional databases and FHIR based standards. Approaches like SQL on FHIR are closing this gap, but making it practical requires technical expertise.

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Bridging Worlds for Impact

Specialty societies are at different stages in their technical journey. Some are pursuing data driven initiatives. Others are taking early steps into FHIR Clinical Reasoning. Many are still deciding where to begin. Yet authoring computable guidelines, modernizing registry infrastructure, and developing interoperable quality measures require specialized expertise at the intersection of clinical informatics and interoperability standards most societies don't have in house.

At Vermonster, we provide both the infrastructure and technical expertise to bridge this gap. Societies bring the clinical authority and deep domain knowledge. We bring ReasonHub, a platform to author, validate, and distribute computable guidelines, logic, and quality measures, along with experience implementing FHIR Clinical Reasoning. Together, this partnership helps translate clinical intent into operational reality. If you're working on living guidelines, computable measures, or registry modernization, we'd love to talk.