Connectathon – with sushi

The 23rd FHIR connectathon in Sydney is almost upon us, and despite the trials and tribulations that the weather has thrown at us, it’s going to be a great event with over 150 people currently scheduled to attend. There are 15 tracks, a number of which are for local initiatives (like the Primary Care track or ePrescribing track) as well as the more general ones, so there’s plenty of choice for attendees. We do recommend that you choose one track as your primary track – perhaps observing others of particular interest – as that seems to bring the best benefit to attendees and the spec.

For myself, I’m going to participate in the FHIR shorthand  track. This is an initiative being driven by the Mitre Corporation in the US, which is a not-for-profit organization heavily involved in the FHIR community to create a simpler way to produce FHIR profiles.

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Provider Directories – part 1

So I’ve been sort of following the Validated Directory track at the Connectathon in San Antonio. I say ‘sort of’ because I’m interested in the idea of using the VerificationResult resource to track the provenance of individual entries in a registry (though I’m not entirely clear about the relationship between VerificationResult and Provenance).

Update: After a chat with those who know these things, the Provenance resource indicates who actually created the resource, while the VerificationResult is who said the information was correct. So I might create a Practitioner resource with my qualifications (so the Provenance points to me) while my Medical School confirms that I do, indeed, have a medical degree – which would be the VerificationResult. And there could be multiple VerificationResults if, say, the check needed to be repeated.

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FHIR Prototyping with Node-RED – part 2

In part one of this series, we looked at using node-RED to manage notifications using the FHIR Subscription resource for a Use Case where relatives (or other care givers) could be notified when a person is admitted to hospital. We looked at the overall flow – now let’s look a bit deeper into some of the details.

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FHIR Prototyping with Node-RED – part 1

As FHIR continues to mature, one of the things we’re seeing is a move away from ‘simple’ data representation Implementation Guides to more complex ones that describe a workflow of some sort. Compare, for example the Argonaut data query Implementation Guide with the Argonaut scheduling guide currently in development. The scheduling guide has got a lot of workflow components to it.

As you will know, a large part of the FHIR ethos is the practical testing of these guides before they are finalized to ensure that they are fit for purpose – often at a Connectathon. But to implement guides like this often requires a significant amount of coding – especially for the server. Is there a simpler way that these guides can be tested?

In this post, I’ll talk about one possibility – using the Node-RED application to develop a prototype server which can quickly be altered as testing occurs.

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Montreal Connectathon

I would imagine that most readers of this blog are aware of the Connectathons that we hold at the beginning of each Working Group Meeting. These events are critical to the evolution of FHIR as an ‘implementer friendly’ standard, so we love to have as many people present as possible!

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Opening up clinFHIR – An example generator

I’d always intended that clinFHIR would be an open source project.

It all started when we were planning the ‘Clinician Connectathons’ – now ‘Clinicians on FHIR’ a year or so back, and realized that we needed some sort of tooling to support the events – tooling that would allow a user to create resources – and view the references between those resources – in a way that made sense to a clinician rather than a techie, and didn’t require them to understand the ‘on the wire’ formats of a resource (unless they wanted to).

After a few false starts, the current version was developed that seems to meet the need of the events. In fact, there are a number of different tools under the clinFHIR umbrella:

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Test-Driven Development With FHIR

The following post is written by my colleague Peter Jordan – who was the HL7 New Zealand representative at the January Working Group Meeting in Orlando.

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Server roles in FHIR

As part of the preparation for the connectathon and clinicians challenge at the WGM in October, I decided to update clinFHIR so that it can access different servers for data and ‘conformance’ resources like ValueSet and StructureDefinition. Currently clinFHIR assumes that everything it needs to operate is supplied by a single server – from looking up profiles (StructureDefinition resources), finding and expanding ValueSets through to actually storing and retrieving the resources created for a patient. This is fine when the server is Grahames, as he aims to implement the entire specification (and generally succeeds!) but it’s a big ask for any server to do this.

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The clinFHIR Chat

One of the things we’ve found at the various connectathons we’ve held is that communication between the attendees can be an issue – there are quite a number of different ‘streams’ of activity and it can be hard to connect people with questions or comments, to people with answers.

We’ve used skype in the past, which has been OK, but has a number of limitations – it can be quite a firehose, which means that stuff is missed, there’s no easy to maintain a ‘thread’ of conversation (though sometimes interesting when threads get mixed together!) and hard to review the history at the end of the event. Oh – and there’s a fixed limit of 300 people per conversation, which we recently discovered.

So for the ‘Clinicians on FHIR’ event that we’re holding at the HL7 Working Group Meeting in October, we’re going to try a different approach. We’re developing a basic ‘chat’ application that is hierarchically organized, and also integrated with the tooling – clinFHIR – that participants in the event use. If all goes well, it’s also going to help in running ‘virtual’ events in the future, where people are not in the same place.

This post describes how the chat application is structured.

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Canadian Connectathon

For those who don’t mind snow (though I’m told that by April 29 – the connectathon date – the snow has mostly gone).

Here’s the link to the registration site.

There doesn’t appear to be a website (yet) though there are details in a PDF that you can get from the organizers I’m sure. The tracks are listed as:

  1. Patient resource client
  2. SMART server or client
  3. Questionnaire
  4. Experimental

cheers…

BTW – Lloyd did offer to arrange for snow if I came, but alas…