Summary of #FHIR progress at the HL7 WGM in Phoenix

May 10, 2014

Well, another HL7 Working Group Meeting (WGM) has come to an end. It was a big week for FHIR, so here’s a summary of the more significant outcomes: * The “FHIR” track was the single biggest track (at least, that’s what was reported). Though I did wonder whether that simply reflects that we’re better at keep track - next meeting the way that works will change slightly. But certainly this meeting had the broadest participation in the development of FHIR yet

  • This reflects that solid interest through out HL7 in leveraging the FHIR specification
  • The connectathon held at the start of the meeting was the biggest yet. I was thrilled to see multiple applications effectively sharing the same questionnaire resources. We got a set of really useful feedback
  • We published an update to the FHIR DSTU - the only real effective change was to add an extra note about security issues displaying HTML
  • We started planning for the next DSTU version of FHIR. This is planned to be released in March 2015. Here’s a list of new features that it is planned to have:
  • Managing Appointment scheduling
  • Referrals
  • DICOM Key Image Annotations
  • Device Alarm management
  • Push-based Subscriptions
  • Support for exchange between primary and secondary users of data (more about this in the next blog post)
  • A user/privileges subsystem for systems that want to use it
  • More security guidance around deployment architectures
  • Better support for services
  • Support for publishing implementation guides

  • Much more clinical accessibility

  • In addition, there will be many fixes, and the tooling support will be rounded out (that’s an ongoing process)
  • We’re going to hold a couple of significant out-reach activities in the next few months:
  • Joint review of some clinical resources with theopenEHRcommunity

  • An open source virtual connectathon

  • In addition, we’re going to hold a “Clinical Connectathon” at the next HL7 meeting (we’re still working out exactly that that means, and this will be a prototype one to find out whether the idea works)
  • Finally, at the next HL7 WGM at Chicago, we’ll be holding another connectathon. There’ll be 3 tracks:
  • Patient (for new particpants)
  • Conformance (Conformance, Profile, and Valueset)

  • Experimental (based on the dev version of the spec, not the existing DSTU)

  • We’re still considering options for the theme of the experimental track