[msamwald]

Yes, but FHIR was the result of many years that had previously been wasted with HL7 v3, which was so convoluted that at some point some people in the community gave up on it and came up with FHIR to get things done. The clock did not start ticking in 2014. HL7 already wasted a lot of time and effort, to the very real detriment of many patients around the world.

[nradov]

It's easy to criticize in hindsight but FHIR wouldn't have been possible without the lessons learned from HL7 V3 so there was really no wasted time. Sometimes the only way to learn is to make mistakes.

FHIR by itself is no panacea; it has some nice improvements, and makes implementations significantly cheaper and more efficient but it doesn't enable any fundamental new use cases. HL7 V3 standards such as CDA R2 are actively used today to deliver patient care all over the world.