FHIR Foundation Report for January 2018

Most of the report for this month is actually in the FHIR Product Director's blog - please read that first.

Certification / Conformance

Feedback around the project is strong that we need to increase our efforts around consistency. That is - consistent message, accurate education, and conformant implementations. We're seeing plenty of tutorials that aren't correct, and we're seeing implementations claiming to be using FHIR, but not actually technically conformant.

FHIR is an open community, so these are not something we can simply stop - you might call it the price of success. Over the next few months, we'll be working to build better credentialing and conformance testing systems. Discussion relating to this is very welcome from foundation members - see http://www.fhir.org/node/26 to join in.

Apple / Google

The biggest news in the FHIR eco-system this month was Apple's formal release of their new health records software. From a purely technical perspective, it's fairly straight forward news: they've provided a iOS client for Argonaut servers (using the S4S synchronization). Given a consumer with an account on the health system, they can retrieve basic information about their health record as supported by the argonaut server.

In business terms, though, and as a sign of maturity for FHIR, it's really big news, and the FHIR team received an amazing amount of correspondance about it. Congratulations to the FHIR foundation members and other members of the community who worked with Apple to make it possible.

Another release of note was Google's research paper about data analytics using FHIR. This wasn't really new - the FHIR related part of the content was presented at FHIR DevDays in Amsterdam last year, but it still generated lots of interest in FHIR across several different communities.

Note: I'm happy to draw attention to FHIR Foundation member press releases here- just let me know. But I'm afraid that there's not much chance any members will create as much waves as Apple or Google....

Upcoming events

  • HIMMS, Las Vegas, Mar 5-9
  • HL7 WGM, Cologne: May 12-18
  • FHIR DevDays, Boston
See http://fhir.org/calendar (reminder: please let grahame@hl7.org or wkubick@fhir.org of FHIR related events)