Glossary
What is MCP for healthcare?
Model Context Protocol (MCP) for healthcare is the application of MCP, a standard interface for LLM agents to call external tools, to clinical systems where the tools include FHIR reads, writes, and operations.
In context
MCP defines a protocol for an agent runtime to expose tools to a language model and for the model to call them. In a healthcare deployment the tools wrap clinical-system operations: read this patient's recent Observations, draft a note, retrieve a document.
The interesting work is keeping the access boundary intact when the caller is an LLM. The standard pattern is to give the agent a scoped service identity and to put the access decision on the FHIR server side, not in the agent's tool implementation.
How Fire Arrow handles it
Fire Arrow exposes the FHIR API the MCP runtime calls into. The agent runs as a service identity (or through on-behalf-of identity flow); the rule chain enforces access; the audit log captures both the agent identity and the user identity where applicable.