Most readers of this blog will be familiar with Project Argonaut – a project announced last year under the aegis of HL7 but funded by a number of US Vendors & Healthcare Providers to help accelerate the development of FHIR, and also the ‘SMART on FHIR‘ project.
Last week there was an on-line kick-off meeting attended by almost 100 people to describe the scope and purpose of the project, and to invite participation in the next phase. The project team were at pains to emphasise that the purpose of Argonaut is to accelerate the current work – it is not a ‘fork’ of the specification, or in competition with it in any way. All of the outputs remain fully open source – in fact they define it as a ‘code and documentation sprint’ – one that is time based and will finish once the objectives have been achieved (though, to my mind, follow-on projects are likely).
From a scope perspective, the following is taken directly from the presentation given at that seminar:
The Argonaut Project is refining and packaging specifications and implementation guides for:
- FHIR RESTful API for data element query of the Common MU Data Set
- FHIR RESTful API for document-level query of static documents (such as CCDA)
- SMART on FHIR OAuth2 security profile for authorization of enterprise-approved applications to retrieve health data
- SMART on FHIR OpenID Connect profile for single sign-on to enterprise-approved applications
Ultimate goal is to broaden the OAuth2 use cases to include authorizations for accesses that cross organizational boundaries, but the current use cases focus on simpler scenarios involving the use of hosted and mobile apps to access resources within a single organization. Specifically:
- Hosted applications that enable a patient to access her own EHR data
- Mobile apps that enable a patient to access her own EHR data
- Hosted applications that enable a clinician to access data within a single EHR
- Mobile apps that enable a clinician to access data within a single EHR
Stewardship
- The FHIR Data Query Profile and FHIR Document Query Profile and accompanying Implementation Guides will be included as an informative ballot mapped to the general FHIR DSTU R2
- The Security Implementation Guide will eventually be incorporated in the HL7 balloting process but for this project will be developed in parallel to accompany the FHIR Data Query and Document Query Profiles and Implementation Guides
The project is now at the stage where wider involvement from the community is being sought to actually participate in the testing. There are 3 ‘levels’ of participation:
- Pilot Implementations – for organizations that are ready to begin pre-production deployment
- Synchronous testing & Connectathons – for organisations that aren’t ready to go live, but do have the internal resources to participate in real-time virtual connectathons
- Asynchronous Testing – for organizations that do wish to participate – but at their own pace rather than at the time that the virtual connectathons are held.
The time line is pretty tight – by the end of April they hope to have completed the following steps:
- Query for patient demographics with no added security layer
- Add: Query for CCDA and security for hosted (confidential) applications
- Add: Query for additional data fields (Problems?, Medications?)
- Add: Security for mobile (public) applications
If you do wish to participate – and the more the merrier! – then contact Jennifer Monahan at jmonahan{at}maehc{dot}org (email included with permission)
exciting times!