#FHIR Product Director

Jan 16, 2016

While in Orlando last week, HL7 appointed me The “FHIR Product Director”. This is a new position that has been created by HL7 in accordance with the HL7 BAM (“Business Architecture Model” – can you tell that HL7 likes acronyms and ‘models’?). For HL7, appointing me to FHIR Product Director role achieves two important goals: * It’s a step on the path towards sustainability for the FHIR project

  • It formalises HL7’s business arrangements around the FHIR project

Sustainability

The FHIR project has done amazingly well – that is, I’m astonished at how well it’s done. The growth of the community is an order of magnitude bigger than our most confident projections when we started working on it. While we’re obviously delighted about that, it’s brought some challenges with it, principally around scaling up the team that develops the specification, and supports the implementation community. That direct FHIR team includes a lot of people (>100) playing a variety of roles:

  • Evangelism
  • Requirements gathering
  • Standards design and Consensus building
  • Editing the specification
  • Developing implementation tools and libraries
  • Answering Implementer questions
  • Arranging connectathons
  • Developing Implementation Guides
  • Using FHIR in prototype and production applications

All of these roles are critical, and greatly appreciated. But it’s just not feasible to continue running with a team this size, having the impact it’s having, without some formal arrangements for management and co-ordination in the team. Appointing an HL7 Product Director is a part of that, though more will be required.

HL7 Business Arrangements

Obviously, FHIR is a critical part of HL7’s future business plans. Like any business (HL7 is a business, though a not-for-profit one), HL7 has to do normal product management – continuity, managing, planning, building relationships etc. We’ve been doing those things, but the FHIR Product Director position creates a formal basis for these, and offers HL7 the opportunity to define the formal and informal arrangements around the project.

Product Director Role

Several people asked me exactly what it means for the FHIR project. The position of “FHIR Product Director” is new, so we don’t really know the answers. What I agreed with the HL7 Executive Committee is that I will be accountable for the following:

  • Liaise with all parts of the FHIR community (including committees, HL7 management, stakeholders, members) to ensure continued development of FHIR product and community
  • Work with existing management and governance structures to build FHIR product and community
  • Work with TSC to formalize the role and develop a job description
  • Run the FHIR balloting and publishing process, and ensure business continuity around these arrangements (including documenting FHIR processes and procedures)
  • Work with HL7 and the FHIR community to create the FHIR Foundation (http://fhir.org)
  • Produce a monthly report documenting FHIR Product Director activities, issues and concerns

There’s one item in this list that will be new for a lot of people: the FHIR foundation. I’ll blog about this in the near future.

Generally, from the perspective of the FHIR project, formalising the role of the FHIR Product Director doesn’t really change very much. In terms of formal management, I’ve resigned from the FHIR governance board, and will instead join both the governance board and the management group as a non-voting member in an ex-officio role. Further, a few activities around documenting policies and procedures that hadn’t been getting timely attention will be addressed.

In addition, I’ll be creating a FHIR Product Director blog to address the public side of some of these. I’ll continue to blog here for anything that’s not official Product Director business.

Note: The Product Director is a part time position. I’ll continue to work for my existing customers helping them to integrate healthcare systems, and to make the best use of HL7 and other standards.