#FHIR Connectathon 4.5

At the end of last month it was my great pleasure to attend the IHIC 2013 FHIR Connectathon - out of cycle, this took place in Sydney Australia.  This was the first FHIR connectathon I have attended in person and it was both great fun and also a great learning experience.  The benefits of working on implementations with a group of folks ready to discuss and explore issues is incredibly rewarding both in benefits to my implementations but also the community building that carries on beyond the event itself.

With a large Australian showing there were a number of participants that came to the connectathon with their own systems or even a blank slate and some preliminary reading and left with working implementations communicating with other participants.

I was working on my GP wrapper services and along with Grahame Grieve's server and pub/sub tools reached the point of automatic submissions to the HL7Connect server based on the clinical system record FHIR history.  Some real progress in a short space of time.

The other thing I was playing with were some basic population health metrics collected and processed by connection to existing FHIR servers. This use without any specific point-to-point arrangements made with the server vendors.  Here are some samples for 7 servers all with demographics charts and  a couple with smoking status.

Definitely the (geeky) highlight was the demo of Brian Postlethwaite's (DCA) windows phone application searching for patients and providing summaries across multiple FHIR servers.  Phil Wilford's (NEHTA) live adhoc update of his patient details with his newly crafted FHIR client and being able to see changes on the windows phone was met by spontaneous applause.  This is the stuff that old integration folks appreciate, it just works, I just saw it work....

Ballot resolutions to deal with for the next connectathon - should be fun; no really; I am looking forward to it.

FHIR free the data...