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FHIR DevDays and the year in review

Publication date: Dec 27, 2018

A review of the recent FHIR DevDays in Amsterdam, and of the future direction of our training courses.

The recent DevDays meeting in Amsterdam was sold out, the second time in a row. About 250 of the 370 attendees attended a DevDays for the first time. The DevDays meetings are maturing, not just in terms of organisation, but also in terms of topics covered during the various sessions. The range of subjects is diversifying, and there is a trend to slowly move away from a focus on the core technical aspects of FHIR (and the development of the FHIR standard) to the actual application/implementation aspects thereof. The next DevDays will be in Redmond (near Seattle, USA) at the Microsoft campus, with (as I've heard) a maximum capacity of 700 attendees. Obviously the focus will be on some of the US FHIR efforts (Argonaut, SDC, C-CCDA-on-FHIR, ..) intertwined with a similar range of FHIR topics as covered during the European DevDays.


FHIR Order Management and Results Reporting

This year I was asked to speak about "Order communications" and "Scheduling". The room used for the Order Comms talk was attractive to me (as a speaker), a 250 seat room with 7 projectors. First I created a presentation for use on a single projector, and subsequently reworked it for a 7 projector environment. The second presentation was about Scheduling, a topic which is seeing a lot of implementations in (Patient-facing) Apps. The material covered by these presentations was used to update our FHIR overview training course.


FHIR Scheduling

The year in review

In 2018 we started offering our training courses in Brussels (Belgium), jointly with IHE Belgium. These training courses will be held in English, as a kind of neutral third language to avoid Belgian sensitivities around the use of either French or Dutch.

In terms of training courses:

  • HL7 version 2, DICOM and Interoperability Standards Overview training courses are more or less stable, both in terms of the number of attendees as well as content.
  • HL7 CDA training courses are on a steep decline; a few countries (because of past commitments) still have an interest in this, but it seems clear we're looking at the tail end of a success story.
  • FHIR training courses are on the increase, both as open-registration training courses as well as in-company. For example: we provided 6 FHIR training courses in a two week period (4 different trainers, 5 different countries) in September. In terms of content we're gradually changing its content to reflect the change in interest in the FHIR standard; much like the DevDays we're gradually moving away from a focus on the core technical aspects of FHIR the actual usage thereof. As the material is being used in an ever increasing number of countries we're in the process of adding country-specific training materials and exercises to the material. Interest in the FHIR Profiling training course is spotty, it is mostly delivered as an in-company training course for those organisations involved in the creation of profiles and implementation guides.
  • IHE XDS training courses are also on the increase; there are a few large national projects in Europe for the exchange of documents (notably Austria, Switzerland, Finland, and France), and many regional initiatives to exchange diagnostic images. We get an increasing number of questions about using a combination of FHIR and XDS, so we're expanding our coverage of how to combine these standards, as well as the use of the IHE MHD profile.

In 2019 we'll once again organise a IHE XDS Advanced training course, mainly aimed at European IHE XDS implementers/testers. This training course, because of its specialised content, will be offered once every two years. We're currently working to update its content - by incorporating feedback and suggestions from XDS implementers and consultants.

All the best for 2019!,

-Rene

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Ringholm bv is a group of European experts in the field of messaging standards and systems integration in healthcare IT. We provide the industry's most advanced training courses and consulting on healthcare information exchange standards.
Rene's Column (English) Rene is the Tutor-in-chief of Ringholm.
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