Preparing for the Australia #FHIR Connectathon
Oct 27, 2014It’s 10 days or sp until the Australian FHIR Connectathon, which is Friday. This post is to help people who are preparing for that connectathon. There’s 3 tracks at the Australian Connectathon: Track 1: Patient resource (Introductory)
This track serves as the simple introductory task for anyone who hasn’t been to a connectathon before, though previous attendees will find it useful for extending their experience and knowledge. The patient scenario is to write a client that can follow this simple sequence:
- Search for a patient
- Get a selected patient’s full details
- Edit and Update the patient details
- Create a new patient record
Or, alternatively, to write a server that is able to support some or all of these functions.
This is useful because the same patterns and problems apply to all the other resources, and very nearly everyone has to implement the patient resource.
If you’re writing a client, our experience is that your minimum preparation is to start the day with a functioning development environment of your choice - to be able to develop and execute. If you don’t have that set up, you can lose most of the day just getting that done. If you’re writing a server, then the minimum functionality is to have a working web server that you know how to extend
Beyond the ability to develop and execute, any additional work you do before hand to work non these scenarios means that on the day you’ll get further into the scenario, and you’ll get that much more out of it.
Track technical lead: Grahame Grieve
Track 2: Smart on FHIR
This track is more advanced; it uses more functionality and makes deeper use of the functionality that FHIR provides, and adds to this additional context and security related content. For further information about this track, see the Chicago Connectathon Details
Track technical lead: Josh Mandel
Track 3: Clinical Connectathon
The first 2 tracks are distinctively developer tracks - to participate, you really need to be able to develop product (which is not the same as “being a developer”). Still, there are many users of interoperability specifications who are interested in how FHIR works, and these participants have as much to gain from a hands on experience learning FHIR as developers do - and the FHIR specification and community have just as much to learn from them too. With this in mind, the FHIR core team is working towards a connectathon experience that is focused on the end-user experience with FHIR. We held our first “Clinical Connectathon” in Chicago - you can read the summary report from it.
The 3rd track will be a follow up to the Chicago connectathon. Participants in this track will use tools provided by the core team to match the capabilities of the FHIR specification against the requirements and tasks of routine clinical workflow. There’s no preparation needed, except to turn up with a working laptop (or even tablet) that has the latest version of your favourite web browser installed (no support for old versions of IE).
Participants should not that this whole clinical track is a work in progress - it needs mature tooling from the core team, and we are still working towards that goal. This connectathon will be exercising the tooling that supports it as much as it’s going to be exercising clinical scenarios against the FHIR specification.
String clinical lead: Stephen Chu. Stream technical lead: David Hay