FHIR Starter

Task #1 An all important part of working with FHIR is coming up with fire related puns, terms and references - even though standards have no sense of humour.  After researching synonyms and related terms for a good deal longer than one ought to came to the project name 'Hiasobi' Japanese for 'playing with fire'.

To start off the real work I perused the FHIR standards page and looked at C# reference platform.   Impressions:

1. That was pretty easy to understand and get across
2. Having reference code is *extremely* helpful for implementers
3. At no point did think 'how is this related to implementing health information systems'

Now, don't get me wrong - I love my HL7 V3, I think it has developed some very important concepts and issues within health information into an approach that can work.  I have built systems with V3 for more than 8 years and it can and does work. This main issue is the 2 or so years at the start where everything you do seems to provide some new reason for a brain explosion; struggle with datatypes; difficult to implement; no tools out of the box; complicated constraint modelling and perhaps most of all the apparent drive to make health information primarily an academic pursuit. 

FHIR, however took me back to when I started HL7 V2.  It make sense straight-up, it has less moving parts so I can get across the basics in hours and the big winner (even better that V2)  - it seems to have been designed to actually be implemented by a set of well supported technologies.

More soon on core definitions and why model driven approaches rock my boat...