10 things we’ve learned at the FHIR Dev Days 2018 in Amsterdam
FHIR Dev Days, an event which took place in Amsterdam between November 14th and 16th, was a wonderful opportunity to finally meet the FHIR community and learn more about the standard.
It was my first time there, and I went to represent our company Lifen on the Startup Track. Here is what I learned :
1 . FHIR around the world
FHIR is expanding fast around the world and some low-income countries have started to show interest in the standard. James Agnew presented his work about spawning new local FHIR communities around the world, and how crossing the language barrier and giving access to ressources that can be easily translated, shared, and used to create these new communities, is key. France is not a low-income country but I realized that we had a lot in common with the South East Asia region regarding FHIR adoption. One of the greatest idea that we will definitely be bringing back to France, is to organize meetups around the FHIR standard and allow people, who are interested in it, to meet each other.
2. FHIR documents
Can we dream a little bit about an international Patient Summary document ? Yes! there are actually people working on it! There is some wonderful work being done around the International Patient Summary profile to exchange patient data all around the world on FHIR by Rob Hausam (Missouri, USA).
3. Patients’ Stories
These kinds of conferences are also built to help us remember why we choose the healthcare sector. It’s a great opportunity to meet patients who feel really attached to their health data. The best two examples that I will remember are E-Patient Dave and the NightScout (#WeAreNotWaiting) initiative. Their main complaint is that, even in 2018, it is still incredibly hard to access your own data. The Nightscout project helps patients suffering from Type-1 diabetes: they offer a remote monitoring solution for controlling glucose levels, using existing devices.
4. Machine Learning and FHIR
We came across some really interesting conversations about standardizing extensions to store the results of an AI algorithm in FHIR! A FHIR chat stream was created during the event to discuss all topics related to data extraction services, such as text analysis, NLP, image recognition etc. We learned that it is an issue shared by many around the world, and Lifen will be joining the working group.
5. FHIR updates
Thanks to the wonderful job of the FHIR Core Team : The R4 release is coming soon! In addition to the continuous normative efforts around base resources, a lot of great tools like graphQL support, packages and bulk export will be available in the near future.
6. FHIR Modelers sessions
At Lifen, our FHIR profiling resources are mostly here for internal use, to exchange specifications between team members. It corresponds to the first two phases of the Modeling process presented by the Firely team : design a new model and build a profile ServerConformance. These FHIRDevDays were the perfect occasion to learn about the next steps in profiling: the validate, share and maintenance phases. https://simplifier.net/guide/profilingacademy/Best-practice
7. Validating FHIR server
Testing and validating conformance is a key element of every FHIR server. For the validation step, I knew a few things about the Crucible platform to test server conformance, and I learned about a new platform to run these tests using a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) method. The demo of the Touchstone platform made by Richard Ettema was straightforward. If you want to know more about testing FHIR, you may want to read that paper : “Validation and Testing of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources Standards Compliance: Data Analysis”.
8. Sharing FHIR specifications
Sharing tools are getting better ! The Implementation Guide tool is available with a web editor in the Simplifier interface. Yes, you heard me well! You won’t need to run your windows VM or some old JAVA code to write it and generate your own guide.
9. FHIR packages
Another new tool to share FHIR resources: the new FHIR Package concept that groups a coherent collection of conformance resources. It will be very useful to import all the French profiles in a single package.
FHIR Infrastructure
Yeah… I know. I didn’t talk about the army of Google & Microsoft developers at the conference. We will certainly write a dedicated article about FHIR cloud solutions once we have tested them all. Unfortunately for now, no one is certified to store healthcare data for the french market (yet!).
10. FHIR & Startups
Thank you Rien Wertheim and the Firely team for organizing the startup track contest!
We believe that the new generation of eHealthTech companies really need to know about FHIR in order to start implementing a common language. It will certainly revolutionize tomorrow’s healthcare IT and help us build a better future for patients (see our article dedicated to FHIR and startups here).
We have many open positions, so feel free to drop us a line if you want to help us achieve our mission!
