Baltimore Working Group Meeting

Well, the Baltimore Working Group Meeting is finished – and what a time it was!

For me the WGM was all about Connectathons – one way or another.

Saturday and Sunday was the technical Connectathon where we have different streams that exercise various aspects of the specification. We had around 180 participants – which is a record number, but we coped pretty well I thought – and many thanks to the HL7 staff who work so hard behind the scenes to make it all work.

There were the usual issues – for example we had a problem accessing ‘gotomeeting’ during the Sunday presentations which meant that Ewout and I were scrambling about with microphones and computer connections to make it all work, but in the end it worked out OK (And there’s still a task on me to upload all the presentations – soon, I promise!)

On the Tuesday in the General Session I was surprised – and honored – to be called up to the front of the room and receive thanks for my work on clinFHIR, along with a nice bottle of wine and a signed copy of Grahames book. It’s something I do gladly to help the community, both the designers of resources and clinicians new to FHIR (an increasingly important audience I believe) and the effort pales in comparison with what other team members do –especially Grahame, Lloyd, Ewout and Josh – but I sure didn’t refuse the wine! (And it explained why a colleague was so insistent on a breakfast meeting that morning . Turned out he was in cahoots with Grahame to make sure I was there! You can remain anonymous, but you know who you are Peter!)

Actually, it was a good meeting for the FHIR community – both Brian & Claude received the Volunteer of the Year award – well deserved.

Then on Friday we had the Clinicians on FHIR event, where the clinical folk use clinFHIR to ensure that FHIR will meet the clinical needs of the community by using the tool to create resources representing various clinical scenarios. For me, this is at the same time the most interesting and the most stressful event of the meeting, as it completely relies on clinFHIR so any bugs are painfully evident! Much of the week (especially evenings and early mornings) is spent enhancing clinFHIR and swatting bugs, so Friday is an anxious time!

And, surprisingly, not everyone uses it in the exact same way that I do – how strange… 🙂

But it’s a wonderful experience – and one that I’m really pleased to be able to attend.

And a reminder to all that at the devDays in November we’re going to have a clinical stream aimed at Clinical and Business Analyst folk who want to learn more about FHIR. We’re still working on the details, but it will be a combination of tutorials and practical exercises in the aspects of FHIR most important to clinicians – like profiling – so I urge you to come along if at all possible.

So now I can relax – for a little while…