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End-to-end FHIR-based HIE... profile for public comment
4 years 2 months ago #5675
by Derek Ritz
Hi all.
A super-important IHE Profile (in my opinion, anyway) is being released for its first round of public comment. The Mobile Health Data Systems (MHDS) profile is being developed by IHE's IT Infrastructure (ITI) technical committee; the lead author on this profile is John Moehrke. The public comment version of MHDS can be found, here .
Here's why I think MHDS is important. At the excellent FHIR North Conference in Hamilton last fall, an international panel of FHIR experts were discussing their deployment experience. During the panel's Q&A, it was revealed that none of the 3 of them were using FHIR-all-the-way... they were all leveraging a FHIR facade over top of their legacy "big iron" digital health infrastructure. When asked why they didn't have FHIR-all-the-way, they all reacted with a surprised "who would do that??" kind of reaction.
I was surprised at the panelists' surprise... and even a bit worried by it. I do a lot of work in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) -- and these countries are unlikely to implement legacy solutions based on, for example, the very-mature CDA-XDS architecture. These LMICs want to "leap-frog" and go straight to implementing FHIR-all-the-way. It should be no surprise that they want to do this... and we should turn our attention to how patient-safe, high-availability, scalable, conformance-testable FHIR-based HIEs can be rolled out... in LMICs and everywhere else.
MHDS is a profile that speaks to how we will be able to do this. Please... let's see if we can garner some helpful feedback to the profile authors regarding this really important work item.
*Note... to comment on IHE work items you need to be a member of IHE International. If you are a member of this IHE Canada community but not a member of IHE International, then let's see if we can capture comments on this thread and convey them via Infoway's membership (as IHE Canada Community comments). That said... please consider joining. IHE membership isn't expensive... and it sustains the global public goods that IHE develops and publishes (all of which are open source, and always have been). It is how we, all of us, avoid "the tragedy of the commons".
A super-important IHE Profile (in my opinion, anyway) is being released for its first round of public comment. The Mobile Health Data Systems (MHDS) profile is being developed by IHE's IT Infrastructure (ITI) technical committee; the lead author on this profile is John Moehrke. The public comment version of MHDS can be found, here .
Here's why I think MHDS is important. At the excellent FHIR North Conference in Hamilton last fall, an international panel of FHIR experts were discussing their deployment experience. During the panel's Q&A, it was revealed that none of the 3 of them were using FHIR-all-the-way... they were all leveraging a FHIR facade over top of their legacy "big iron" digital health infrastructure. When asked why they didn't have FHIR-all-the-way, they all reacted with a surprised "who would do that??" kind of reaction.
I was surprised at the panelists' surprise... and even a bit worried by it. I do a lot of work in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) -- and these countries are unlikely to implement legacy solutions based on, for example, the very-mature CDA-XDS architecture. These LMICs want to "leap-frog" and go straight to implementing FHIR-all-the-way. It should be no surprise that they want to do this... and we should turn our attention to how patient-safe, high-availability, scalable, conformance-testable FHIR-based HIEs can be rolled out... in LMICs and everywhere else.
MHDS is a profile that speaks to how we will be able to do this. Please... let's see if we can garner some helpful feedback to the profile authors regarding this really important work item.
*Note... to comment on IHE work items you need to be a member of IHE International. If you are a member of this IHE Canada community but not a member of IHE International, then let's see if we can capture comments on this thread and convey them via Infoway's membership (as IHE Canada Community comments). That said... please consider joining. IHE membership isn't expensive... and it sustains the global public goods that IHE develops and publishes (all of which are open source, and always have been). It is how we, all of us, avoid "the tragedy of the commons".
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