Trans Tasman Connectathon

So the first trans-tasman connectathon (at least in a little while) is going to be held in a few weeks. There are 3 main streams – 2 of them associated with SMART – that Grahame has written about  and the third one is the IPS – International Patient Summary Implementation Guide, which I’m going to attend.

For those unfamiliar with IPS, it defines a base summary (as a FHIR document) of key clinical data about a patient that was originally intended for patients travelling in different countries to be able to provide medical information to healthcare providers data if needed – but has grown a bit larger than that, and is being widely adopted globally.

FHIR Documents (and other stuff)

I had an email from a company which had a number of really good questions about exposing data through FHIR, so I thought I’d write a post about it rather than just replying directly as it may be of interest to others (and also gives others the opportunity to disagree with me 🙂 )

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GraphBuilder and R5

Just a short post to follow up on using GraphBuilder for building examples.

To help support people building R5 examples for connectathon, I’ve added the ability to select the version of FHIR to use for the graph. Currently the R4 and R5 draft release are supported (as these are the versions that sushi supports).

clinFHIR stock take

I’ve been asked to give a short talk about clinFHIR to a course at Johns Hopkins this month – what it is and what you’d use it for, so to organize my thoughts I decided to write a ‘stock take’ of clinFHIR modules. This is actually part of a project I’ve been working on for a little while – learning FHIR with clinFHIR – so it’s a perfect time to be doing it.

The idea for clinFHIR started shortly after FHIR started to gain prominence within HL7 – coming up to 10 years ago now. The technical folk understood what the developers were trying to do – utilize internet standards to share healthcare data – but it was harder for the clinical folk to gain that understanding and appreciate the significance.

clinFHIR (Clinical FHIR) was envisaged as a way to visualize FHIR – particularly resources and the references between them – so that the committees within HL7 responsible for authoring resources could advance their development. We worked closely with the members of the ‘Patient Care’ committee in particular – they had sessions at most Working Group Meetings called ‘Clinicians on FHIR’, and we developed clinFHIR as one of the main tools for them.

(And I’d like to recognize all the work they put into this – it was an on-going balance between evolving the application to meet identified needs, and dealing with the bugs that a rapid development cycle brings!)

Updating a resource using patch

We’ve received a bit of pushback from the community regarding our proposal to use custom operations for updating the Patient in NHI upgrade project. But the development team really isn’t keen on using PUT updates of the complete resource – the main reason being that of ‘accidental’ data changes when the updater doesn’t return the parts of the resource that should remain unaltered. (Apparently, this is not uncommon with messaging based updates that are kind of similar).

I mentioned in that post that we didn’t really take a close look at PATCH updates – but a couple of days ago I saw this trail in the FHIR chat which is about a similar project (slightly different requirements) and thought I really should take a closer look at PATCH.

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