FHIR Report from Baltimore Meeting

Sep 15, 2012

Well, the Baltimore HL7 Working Group Meeting has (finally) come to end. It’s been an extremely busy meeting, and HL7 is certainly facing some new and difficult challenges in the near future. Now that it’s over, here’s my FHIR progress report.

Ballot

Prior to the meeting, we held a draft for comment ballot. Combined with the issues list from the connectathon, and a few other late submissions, we around 130 issues on the list. These range from questions about the scope of FHIR write down to typographical errors. I thank everyone who contributed to this list greatly - it will help us improve the quality of the specification greatly. I hope that we can get all the issues resolved to everyone’s satisfaction prior to the release of the next ballot.

Our plan is to issue a draft for comment ballot in the January Meeting. This ballot will focus on the resources rather than the infrastructure, and I’m hoping that we’ll have 20 or so resources to review, from a several different committees.A number of committees have enthusiastically embraced the challenges that FHIR presents for them, and are working on resources that will start appearing soon.

Note that the specification found at hl7.org/fhir will be updated on a regular basis prior to the ballot, and comments are welcome at any time - they may be made at any time using the community input link at the top of every page, or on the FHIR mailing list.

In the longer term, we hope to go to ballot for DSTU in the May cycle, and I’m hoping that we’ll do a couple of them - so FHIR would be a full Draft Standard for Trial Use by the end of next year.

Issues

We have a list of issues to resolve. None of them are large, but many of them will cause enthusiastic and robust discussion. Rather than try and resolve the issues on teleconferences, here’s how we’re going to do it:

  • A post will be made on this blog (by me, or a guest post by someone else) describing the issue, and the possible resolutions, along with their pro’s and con’s
  • Debate will follow on the FHIR mailing list (so sign up if you are interested, and not already a member)
  • A wiki page will be created to capture the salient parts of the email discussion (note that you can subscribe to specific wiki pages using rss/atom on the HL7 wiki)
  • A doodle poll will be held (announced on the mailing list) to confirm the resolution of the list

I’ll start posting the issues shortly, though we’ll only be doing one or two at a time.

Collaborations

One of the most exciting outcomes of this meeting for me was the new collaborations between HL7 and other SDOs that arose during this meeting. Since they are joint developments, and some of them aren’t confirmed yet, I’m not going to talk about the individual projects yet, but this really was the best part of the meeting for me. If they come to fruition, it’s going to be big news. Of course, any collaboration between SDO’s is a fragile beast, at the mercy of clashing procedures that can’t be changed - but the intent and the good will are there, and most of the parties have done joint balloting before. Aside: Of particular note, the fact that FHIR is free for use is a real factor in these collaborations. For me, this confirms the wisdom of the board in choosing to change the HL7 rules so that the standards and implementation guides are free to use. I posted a couple of blog posts (one a guest post) that gave some people the impression I didn’t approve. I do - I do think this the right decision, though I’m concerned about the short term effects. This seemed to be the majority opinion amongst the HL7 membership at this meeting. And I learnt at this meeting that HL7 may have enough reserves to ride out the short term consequences. There couldn’t have been a better time to do this anyway.

One collaboration that I can talk about is with the W3C - we are working with the life sciences group to jointly develop semantic web expressions of the resource definitions, the instances, the RIM, and the mapping from the resource definitions to the RIM. Hopefully, Snomed-CT will be included to. This looks like it will provide a powerful connection between the operational and research branches of healthcare.

Awards

The FHIR project core team (Ewout Kramer, Lloyd McKenzie, and myself) gave out the following awards on Tuesday morning:

  • Most Egregarious Error Discovered in FHIR Spec: David Hay (David won this several times over for a variety of issues reported while he developed his solution)
  • Most Enthusiastic Specification Review: Rik Smithies
  • Most Fervent Evangelist:Rene Spronk(See Rene on twitter)
  • Best Contribution:Keith Boone(A ready-to-go spreadsheet generated from a HITSP specification)
  • Most Entertaining Connectathon participant: Jean Duteau

Each participant won a bottle of win (this started as a joke between us at the last meeting, and then cascaded, as these things do)

Connectathon

We’re going to start planning the next connectathon - how could we not, after it was such fun, and we learnt so much? What a great way to develop standards…

So I’ll be putting out a call for participation shortly. I think that there’s a good chance that at least one of the collaborations will feature at the the next connectathon, but we’re not sure yet. Watch this space.

Conclusion

Overall - FHIR is going ahead and leaps and bounds, and I’m really pleased and excited about that - I’m starting to believe that we’re really going to make a difference to healthcare.