FHIR and Healthcare Informatics Education

Dec 3, 2014

One of the interesting things about FHIR is how it offers new prospects for real practical hands-on education. This is about much more than that it’s much easier and more accessible than other health informatics standards. These are the reasons why:

  • the technology base of the implementation is much more open (browsers, etc)
  • there’s a great abundance of open source tools
  • the community’s focus on examples means that there’s already lots of examples
  • the general focus on patient access to data will mean that students are much more easily able to get access to real data (their own, and others - by permission, of course)

But so far, this has remained just a prospect.

Well, not any more.

Last week, at Furore DevDays, I met Simone Heckmann, from Heilbronn, who’s doing a bunch of real interesting stuff with her students. Ewout described it here:

Simone uses FHIR to teach her students about interoperability and show them the caveats and real-life problems involved in building connected systems. And that’s only part of her teaching curriculum; in addition to have them map one type of messages to another standard, she also asks her students to select any of the available open-source FHIR clients and servers, play with them for about a month and extend them. And this is just the prelude to the final part of the teaching program: she then organizes a hackathon at the Hochschule where the students bring their pet projects they have been working on and test them against each other

This is really cool - my immediate response was the same as Ewout’s: “I want to be a student at Heilbronn”. This is really teaching students something - real experience at getting information to flow between systems.

Simone told me that she’s planning to post her course notes etc on the web. I’ll be sure to post a link to them when she does. I’m impressed - this is exactly the kind of can-do practical work that FHIR is all about.

And if that’s not enough, she’s got a FHIR blog too (it’s in German - this is the English translation) .

Welcome, Simone, to the FHIR community.