FHIR Medication lists revisited

October 13, 2014 6 Comments

We’ve looked at representing a patients list of medications in a number of previous posts. This one describes using the List resource to describe the list, here we talked about updating the list using a transaction, and here were some thoughts on what a regional shared list might look like.

Just recently I’ve been involved in doing some more detailed design for this, as we’re looking at building a concrete implementation at Orion Health, so I’ve revisited how we could do it.

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FHIR Messages – part 2

October 6, 2014 3 Comments

In the previous post, we talked about how we could map a relatively simple HL7 v2 message into a FHIR message. We focused on the actual mapping between the two message types, and there were a number of aspects that we didn’t consider – especially workflow & architecture.

In this post, let’s take a closer look at these considerations – perhaps in the form of a ‘checklist’ of things to consider when planning a deployment. We’ll keep the context to the simple one of a radiology result to keep the scope under control.

There’s also a whole section in the spec which talks about messaging as well. In particular there is a discussion on basic messaging assumptions and Message Exchange Patterns that we won’t repeat here – but should be reviewed before any implementation is planned.

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Chinese FHIR documentation

October 5, 2014 Leave a comment

Recently I was in Shanghai, giving a 2 day seminar on FHIR under the auspices of HL7 China and HL7 New Zealand, and sponsored by my employer – Orion Health. I was impressed by the interest in FHIR there, and also that there are some active FHIR projects under way – one of which I’m going to write about as soon as I have the bandwidth to do so!

Quite co-incidentally I received an email from another member of HL7 China – Lin Zhang of  the Department of Nuclear Medicine, Bethune International Peace Hospital who has translated the “Introduction to FHIR tutorial” that we give at the HL7 Working Group meetings into Chinese. The translation has been hosted off the HL7 China wiki here. (FHIR presentations are freely available from the GForge repository, but this is probably a better place for Chinese speaking folk).

Lin has also volunteered to help out with the on-going translation of FHIR specifications into Chinese – an important step for what we hope will be a truly international standard. Give me a shout if you want to contact Lin – better not to post their email here…

Heres a link to some other Chinese FHIR resources.

btw – in case you wondered – I don’t speak Chinese so relied on the expertise of my colleague at Orion Health – Alan Wang to help out with the more compex bits (most of the audience had some english). Thanks Alan!

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Mapping HL7 Version 2 to FHIR Messages

October 5, 2014 25 Comments

When thinking about how FHIR is going to be implemented ‘for real’, it’s likely that ‘green fields’ applications – where there is no existing standard in use – will be early adopters – mobile is an obvious example.

But inevitably, we’re going to need to manage situations where HL7 standards are already in use and we want to introduce FHIR as well – i.e. the two standards are going to co-exist.

There’s a lot of work underway with mapping CDA (and CCDA in particular) to FHIR resources – indeed this work will provide a valuable ‘peer review’ for the completeness of FHIR resources, but in this post let’s have a look at how we might introduce FHIR into an existing HL7 version 2 based infrastructure.

Now, this is a really big area to cover, so we’ll use a specific – and small – Use Case to guide our discussion – we’ll take an HL7 version 2.4 ORU message (technically an ORU^R01 containing a radiology result), and produce a FHIR message that we can submit to a FHIR server, which will then save the Observation in the data store.

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Getting started with FHIR

October 1, 2014 Leave a comment

Grahame suggested that it would be a good idea to ‘pull out’ some of the posts that might be of interest to someone new to FHIR – so I’ve created a separate page for that here (It’s a link from the top menu). It’s a timely reminder as I’m coming up to a year as a blogger – and what a year that was!

Would be interested in any comments about what appropriate sections should be – and any topics that might be worth covering…

It reminded me that I did intend to write a book on FHIR some time –  if I only had time!

cheers…

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