#FHIR DevDays: Collaboration in the time of the virus

Jun 4, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought sweeping changes to our lives. I’m pretty sure that everyone in the world has been affected now. All the changes relate to our ability to meet together - to work, eat, play, and love, and these changes are gradually impacting the quality of lives more and more - or just killing us. I’m particularly concerned that the impact on our lives and the economy is exponential, just like the virus directly. Over time, the gradual degrading of our interactions starts to create network effects, and these are gradually building now. It seems that we are already seeing second order effects.

The FHIR community is not immune to all this; the pandemic means that we’ve had to suspend our regular meeting cycles, and it seems like it will be at least the rest of the year, or even longer, before we can plan to meet face to face again (and even longer for international travel). While the FHIR community has always made heavy use of virtual communication tools - particularly weekly teleconferences that are starting to be videoconferences, and heavy use of chat.fhir.org - these have been built on the fellowship we establish by meeting and eating (and drinking) together in person on a regular basis. And also working together late into the nights in uncomfortable hotel rooms and bars. We can’t do that now - and we fear that this will gradually erode our ability to collaborate.

Instead, we have to build new ways to engage, to leverage virtual meetings as much as we can. A few weeks ago we had our first fully virtual FHIR Connectathon, which was a rousing success, though we learnt plenty that will mean the next one (in September) will be even better. But now our attention turns to FHIR DevDays Virtual Edition, from June 15-18. I’m really looking forward to what is now the main bi-yearly gathering of FHIR implementers.

Of course, the format is quite different now that it’s a purely virtual meeting. That has it downsides, but it also has real advantages too - people don’t have to travel, and that is a barrier many people couldn’t overcome. We’ve taken what we’ve learnt from other virtual meetings, from the connectathon, and added a dose of new innovation to put together what looks like a really exciting program:

  • Lots on the ONC and CMS Final Rule, with talks fromDon RuckerandSteve Posnackand a hands on session onInferno / server certification
  • A Covid-19 Track withMatthew Holt, featuringKeith Boone(SANER),Abigail Watson(building Covid apps on the Synthea Covid dataset) and a panel.John Loonskwill present about eCR Now.
  • New introductory sessions on the FHIR RESTful API and a tour de horizon of the FHIR resources
  • New: Office Hours, ask the experts anything: ONC, Lloyd, Josh, the Firely Team, James, and me
  • Lots of stories of real life implementations and challenges, like from Cleveland Clinic, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Emory Brain Health Center, Georgia Tech, Cedars-Sinai Health System (Community Track)
  • Big Tech on FHIR: Microsoft, Google, IBM
  • New things in the FHIR spec: FHIR Shorthand, FHIR Packages
  • Lots for payers (Da Vinci + CARIN)

Also, Microsoft are going to be running a Hack on FHIR every day. There’s more too… heaps more.

The part I’m most looking forward to myself is a keynote from Arika Okrent, Linguist and author of In the Land of Invented Languages. I’m unabashedly a huge fan of the book, and I’m stoked that she’s speaking to us. I’ve asked many people in the FHIR community to read the book, and I highly recommend it to anyone writing informatics specifications. It’s not only lots of fun, it’s also been very influential for me.

Hats off to Rien and the team at Fire.ly, along with the supporting team at HL7 HQ, for putting together what sounds like a great program - I look forward to seeing you all on zoom…