FHIR for a HL7 v2 person
Jul 5, 2012It’s pretty easy to explain FHIR to a version 2 person. Start with a v2 message… and imagine….
- We’ll give each segment a URL to identify it (it can be a relative URL if we want) - once segments are identified, then you can start storing them and re-using reliably
- Once you can store and identify them, now you can store them a server and share the maintenance of them between systems independent of messages
- We’ll use XML to represent the segment - using field names instead of offset names like PID.3
- We’ll tack on an html representation of the segment for people using systems that don’t understand the segment (like CDA)
- We’ll put a little z-section at the end of each segment - though you have to publish your extension definitions now
- We can still exchange messages by tacking all the segments together in a row like a message, with the special message header first
- Call the segments “resources”
There - done, that was easy. Of course, there’s a couple more things (not a small things):
- Redefine the list of segments and their contents because we learnt so much over the last 20 years
- Strip them down to the parts that people actually use
Still, it’s easy to explain the general principles of FHIR to someone who’s well versed in version 2 in practice.