New Zealand FHIR Seminar

Yesterday we (HL7 New Zealand) gave a full day presentation on FHIR (and some related standards) to a local audience. We had over 40 people present – which is pretty good for a seminar on Informatics Standards in New Zealand!

And for those who did attend – thank you for giving up your time for this! I do hope you found it useful…

We had a couple of objectives in giving this presentation.

• Firstly, to educate and raise awareness of the value of FHIR to healthcare Interoperability in New Zealand.
• Secondly, we are planning some FHIR related sessions at our upcoming HINZ conference at the end of the year, and wanted to encourage people to participate.

I think we succeeded on both counts. The audience was engaged and we had a large number of questions (most of which I could answer <s>) – except towards the end when I was running out of time and had to talk fast! (note to self – must manage time better…). Oh, and thanks to Richard (Blaze server author) for helping when my brain went on hold…

Thinking now about the HINZ conference, what we’d like to do is to have real demonstrations from multiple vendors (and others) showing how FHIR can be used to facilitate access to healthcare information – similar to the example I gave at the seminar where Josh Mandel had organized a SMART demonstration at HIMSS this year.

We’re thinking of a ‘showcase’ of applications showing how FHIR can support an ecosystem of information exchange, and we’ll provide support to participants over the rest of the year in the lead-up.

We’re planning on establishing a set of sample services (Patient/Provider lookup, XDS style Document Registry, Document Store, Clinical data, Profile registry and the like, which will be supplied by the Orion Health Blaze server). This will have sample data in it, and we’ll encourage anyone – vendors and individuals – to write applications that use those services.

There will also be a number of existing systems that have shareable data who could expose that as FHIR services – and we’ll be reaching out to them to participate as well.

The idea is to show those holding the purse strings both how FHIR can facilitate interoperability with orders of magnitude less effort than the current alternatives – and also how vendors can work together to achieve that interoperability (which is something that we did when working on the GP2GP project).

And as the purpose is to show functionality, we won’t concern ourselves with security for the moment. All going well, that will be something that we can look at more seriously when we deploy real applications next year.  FHIR does have recommendations for security, but implementing it does raise the bar for participation considerably, so that can be the next step.

I may be overly optimistic – but, nothing ventured…

Talking to people between the presentations, there are a few vendors who are interested in participating, which is great – and we’ve got the rest of the year to recruit others!

So, any New Zealanders (or overseas readers for that matter) who are interested in participating – just click on the ‘Contact’ button at the top of the blog and send me a message. We’re looking for anyone interested – client or server, desktop or mobile, and any scenario that has value to clinicians or patients.

As promised, I’ve uploaded the presentations to slideshare, and the links follow. And, although mentioned in the presentations, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Lloyd, Ewout and Grahame as many of the slides were adapted from presentations they have made.

Again – to those who did come along – thank you for your support!

I had intended to provide links to slideshare rather than embedding content – but can’t seem to get that to work. (If anyone does know how, then let me know!). The list of presentations is:

• Introduction to FHIR (David hay)
• FHIR for architects and developers (David hay)
• Archetypes and FHIR (Koray Atalag)
• Please don’t spell SNOMED with a w (Alastair Kenworthy)
• Possible uses for FHIR in New Zealand (Peter Jordan)

If you do want to download a presentation then click the ‘share’ icon in the top right hand corner of the presentation. The link is shown in the dialog that is presented. Copy and paste it into a browser which will show the presentation in slideshare. You can download it from there.

Sorry about that…

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Introduction to FHIR (David hay)

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FHIR for architects and developers (David hay)

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Archetypes and FHIR (Koray Atalag)

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Please don’t spell SNOMED with a w (Alastair Kenworthy)

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Possible uses for FHIR in New Zealand (Peter Jordan)

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