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!)

FHIR enabling an Immunization registry – part 4

So we’ve talked about how to represent an immunization program both in the abstract (the overall definition of a national plan) and the specific (the plan applied to an individual). In addition, we discussed how to submit the actual administrations to the registry.

What we haven’t really talked about is how to measure the performance of an individual against the plan.

Custom Implementation Guide templates

As you’ll likely be aware, FHIR uses Implementation Guides (IG) to describe how to use FHIR for specific scenarios or use cases. In the past it has been technically challenging to create these guides, but this is changing – in large part due to new tooling/approaches like shorthand and sushi, but also because the FHIR community (and especially Lloyd) have been working on a template based publisher.

The idea behind the template based publisher is that there are a number of standard templates for specific purposes such as an ‘official’ HL7 FHIR IG or a plain template, and these can then be adapted for specific purposes – such as a National IG or a vendor specific one describing a FHIR based implementation. The project is still relatively new, but becoming stable enough that people are able to use it. However, the newness means that the documentation is still catching up, so when my colleague Jose Costa Teixeira offered to write a ‘beginners guide to creating your very own template’ I said great!

He’s published it on his blog, but kindly allowed me to reproduce it here.

Without further ado, take it away Jose… Read more of this post

Creating examples

Examples are probably one of the more useful things to an implementer – yet likely the least exciting part of building an Implementation Guide (IG) to the designer. And not only are they useful to the implementer, they are a good way to double check the actual IG – it’s surprising how often having to create an example finds issues with the artifacts within an IG.

But the tooling to create examples is not that great. Generally you’re using a generic JSON or XML tool which offers no editing support to ensure that the example is valid (you can use the $validate operation that I’ve discussed before, but the workflow is tedious). I’ve tried to use clinFHIR for that – and it does work, though chokes some of the more complex profiles, and is still quite slow to create the resource instance.

There is an alternative that I’m currently using that seems to resolve these issues – the shorthand spec (with associated sushi reference implementation) that I blogged about last week. As well as producing profiles, it can also create resource instances using the same syntax as for profiles, and even better – when you run sushi to generate the resources, it will pick up the more egregious errors.

Read more of this post

Subscriptions

For those interested in Subscriptions – here’s a blog post from Gino Canessa of Microsoft who is deeply involved in the R5 redesign of this, particularly the Subscription resource.