Australian FHIR Connectathon and Tutorial

Mar 21, 2013

We’ll be holding a FHIR connectathon here in Australia as part of the IHIC 2013 – International HL7 Interoperability Conference in Sydney in late October 2013 (around 28-30). This is an opportunity for Australasian implementers and vendors to get practical experience in FHIR. Here’s why you should consider attending:

  • Find out what all the excitement is about
  • Get a head start building FHIR into your products
  • Get a real sense of what FHIR is good for, and what it isn’t
  • Help ensure that FHIR meets real-world Australasian requirements
  • Be a recognised part of the FHIR community
  • Connectathons are real fun

Realistically, this is likely to be the only connectathon held here in Australia (at least, the only one prior to the publishing of FHIR as a DSTU). The connectathon is focused around actual exchange of content, not theory (there is a place for theory, but the connectathon is not part of it). So it’s really suitable for technical staff, though we have a few non-technical staff brushing off the cobwebs in order to participate in the HL7 connectathons.

FHIR connectathons are always start with exchanging patient information, and then we build on that depending on the interests of the actual participants. We’ll be putting out an call for expressions of interest in a few months time, after which we’ll start clarifying what our actual scenarios will be. However I expect that MHD (mobile friendly version of XDS) is likely to be in scope.

In about July/August I’ll hold a 1 or 2 day tutorial here in Melbourne looking at FHIR in depth, with a focus on implementation issues. This tutorial will start with a general review of FHIR, and then look at depth at the FHIR reference platforms, how to use http tools to exercise and debug interfaces, how to convert from v2 to FHIR and vice versa, and look in detail at various models for implementing a server.

If you might be interested in attending this tutorial, drop me a line at [email protected] - I’m trying to get a feel for event hosting issues such as facility and cost.