FHIR DSTU / Connectathon Stable Version Posted

Aug 9, 2013

We’ve posted the stable version of the FHIR specification that will be used for the DSTU ballot opening in a few days, and also this version will be the one used for the connectathons in Cambridge and Sydney. Some minor cosmetic changes are anticipated, but nothing of substance, in particular there will be nothing that changes the schema anymore. So we are now in the connectathon freeze. The new FHIR spec has undergone a major cosmetic redesign. The old sidebar was very functional - at least to me - but also attracted a lot of attention about being unfashionable etc. And then it got too long, and it wasn’t good anymore. So with the help of Studio-Joyo (thanks heaps), we’ve updated to a very current look (based on bootstrap, for those who care). We’re still settling things down, and I think it looks much much better, and we’ve got it working as efficiently as the old one too after a little bit of teething (though I still have to figure out what’s happened to the Google search button). It’s been an interesting process - the requirements for a web site and a formal standard aren’t quite in alignment. But we’re nearly there after a marathon effort.

One thing of note about this - prior to the DSTU, we underwent a QA process, where a bunch of volunteers worked through the spec looking for misspellings, broken links, logical fallacies, and other obvious mistakes. I think those volunteers very much - the specification is much improved because of their work. Unfortunately we couldn’t fix everything, but anything we didn’t fix will be carried forward to the ballot.

Servers

In addition, I have updated my server (http://hl7connect.healthintersections.com.au/svc/fhir) to the same version as the posted specification. The other test servers will catch up as the connectathon approaches. I can update quicker than most, because I run with less manually written code than all the rest of the servers, so I can update quicker - the only manually written code I write is the actual indexing routines. I’ve considered trying to automate them too - the xpaths are published for most of them - but I’ve found that this a good way to perform my own QA check on the resources (and also I run closest to the editorial cycle)

 

p.s. Some people have complained to me that the FHIR site on HL7 frequently fails to load. This happens to me all the time - the HL7 DNS is a problem for me, and the first request fails when the address is not cached. I thought it was just me (or telstra here in Australia, but I’ve had reports of the same problem elsewhere. If you have problems accessing the HL7 web site, drop me an email