Dev days in November

In the past I’ve talked about the FHIR Developer days hosted by our friends Furore in November in Amsterdam – generally with a slightly envious tone. This year – thanks to my employer Orion Health – I’m able to attend! (I’m going to get into the group picture at last 🙂 )

Since I’m going to be there and I have a clinical background, the Furore folk suggested that I might want to lead a track specifically for Clinicians and Business Analysts who want to learn more about FHIR – so this post is all about putting some ideas out to get feedback.

Perhaps you are a Clinician or Business Analyst employed by a vendor to assist with product development – or maybe you play a leading role in implementations at, say, a hospital or some other healthcare facility and need to advise on how it should be configured for maximal clinical value.

Even if not currently involved in FHIR implementations, you are very likely to be in the near future, and so need to have an understanding of how FHIR works – and what you need to understand to be able to make it meet your own scenarios.

We haven’t locked down the programme (which is one reason I’m writing this – to get ideas from you about what you’d like us to do), but we’re imagining a program that combines theory and practical. Something like:

Some presentations on FHIR (from a clinical perspective):

• Why you’d use it and what are the expected benefits in doing so (so you can speak knowledgeably to decision makers about it)
• The fundamentals of FHIR – specially resources and datatypes
• A review of all the resources currently available – especially the clinical ones
• Using coded data, ValueSets and the use of Terminology – including FHIR based terminology services
• Using FHIR to share data – whether by real-time API, Documents, Messages
• Decision support and Quality measures
• Profiling – the basics, why it’s there and what it does
• Standards that build on FHIR – like SMART and CDS-Hooks
• How FHIR is developed and how to get your ideas into the specification
• Engaging with the community – how to get help – and help others

And whatever else we think would be of interest to a clinician.

And we’d make sure we worked in with some of the other tracks that could be of interest – such as the  logical modeling and openEHR one that Grahame is giving.

We’d go over some of the tooling that is available to help learn FHIR – basic tools like XML & JSON editors plus REST clients to test out servers – but especially clinFHIR that was built with that purpose in mind.

There will be some exercises to help you get familiar with the tooling – and also to help cement some of the concepts we talk about during the presentations (don’t worry – we’ll break it all up into digestible pieces!).

Then we’ll spend some quality time on Profiling, as this is the area that you are likely to be the most involved in during an implementation or a development project. We’ll talk about the capabilities – and limitations – of the profiling infrastructure and the tooling currently available to find and build profiles. We’ll talk about all the different artifacts we’re going to need in real life – the profiles themselves (StructureDefinition) plus other resources such as ValueSets, NamingSystem, Implementation Guides and so forth.

We’ll also take a look at Forge which is the professional profile builder built by our hosts Furore as well as Simplifier – where the conformance resources can be saved.

There will be some practical exercise where we take a clinical Use Case, define the profiling artifacts we need (perhaps using openEHR as an analysis tool to do so, or just a spreadsheet), build and deploy them, and then create some real resources based on those profiles.

We’re also investigating the possibility of ‘pairing up’ clinicians and developers to build some real applications just to show how easy this can be.

So what do you think?

There will be plenty of opportunities to dive into the depths of FHIR if you want to by attending any of the other tracks, all the FHIR experts will be there for your questions and it will be a great networking opportunity to meet with like-minded people – what’s not to like?

(Oh, and there will also be beer! )

Please feed back any comments and/or suggestions you may have either as comments to this post or directly to my email – david dot hay25 at gmail.com and I’ll see you in Amsterdam!