Tooling Discussion | Policy and Usage of Simplifier.net - April 3rd, 2-3pm EST

Hi All,

Thank you Joel for addressing B.C. concerns in National FHIR Solution Architecture group and I think we had a good discussion and required follow-up sessions. By addressing this, CHI is having an opportunity to consider each provincial representative feedback from there perspective on naming convention, version control, Lifecycle of FHIR profiles on Simplifier.net/ other and over all governance around Canadian FHIR registry.

I agree during the meeting several concerns were addressed. In addition, cost factor was the one gave most attention to each province representative, due to which the meeting ended up with some more follow-up / analysis for these issues. If I understood correctly during analysis CHI will be considering authoring, publishing, version control, and backups’ financial impact on CHI and to provinces, if any.

In nutshell, I think we should have to have a clear governance first which will reflect on the policy and usage of Simplifier.net or/and any other tool(s).

Thanks
Mukesh Kashyap
Senior Business Analyst - HIIS
B.C. Ministry of Health

Hi Joel,

There are no concerns from Northern Health (NH) regarding Simplifier’s version control. The main concerns with Simplifier we had when we adopted IG publisher are:
• At that time Simplifier was still on FHIR Version 3 (NH Information model was using FHIR 4)
• Lack of customization in simplifier - as we are creating custom mapping tabs in the IG for each of our source systems (to denote how FHIR elements are being mapped to the source system)
However, we are also interested in exploring Simplifier for publishing the profiles and making it shareable with other organizations (since it has straight-forward process for publishing profiles and creating IG). With Canadian/BC registries on simplifier, I guess we can publish our profiles under these spaces (if needed)..

Thanks,
Raman Dhanoa
Standards Specialist, Northern Health, BC

Hi All,

Please find the Simplifier.net long term requirements that were captured at the FHIR Solution Architecture Meeting (last Friday) and shared with the HL7 Community at the meeting this afternoon. I have added the AODA requirement that was missing.

Requirements: Simplifier.net Long-Term Requirements and Guidelines

Thanks,

Hi Ken,

Thank you for the minutes. First off, I suspect not all topics may have been discussed on the call and these may have been after thoughts that were sent along either during the chair or via email. I have added comments clarifying the issues that were listed

Off the call topics:

• Saskatchewan is apparently looking at cloud systems, eg Microsoft Azure, suggested Infoway investigate (T.Zhou)
• the only publication solution that ArtDecor connects to is Simplifier (for BC)

Simplifier as the long-term solution
Northern Health has been using the HL7 IG publisher; exploring Simplifier but concerns w version control and licensing – Joel: I think the issue here is that Northern Health wanted its own organizational space on Simplifier.net Would someone from Northern Health please confirm?
Simplifier.net uses GitHub for version control.
Trifolia -on-FHIR (trifolia-fhir.lantanagroup.com/lantana_hapi_r4/home) is not as easy to use, and not as feature-rich

Costs
growing number of projects have cost mplication: Firely model is to charge per project
- based on information gleaned from separate discussions between Firely and IHE International, it was reported that there does not seem to be much room for negotiation regarding licensing.

<strong>Attendees:</strong>

Igor Sirkovich
Joel Francis
Lorraine Constable
Michael Savage
Mukesh Kashyap
Randy Nonay
Shamil Nizamov
Shelly Weslosky
Mhu3
Scott Prior
Sheridan Cook
Ross Shnaper
Harsh Sharma
Aman Ish Goyal
Northern Health, BC
Raman Dhanoa
Jean Duteau
Elliot Silver
Thomas Zhou

<strong>Agenda:</strong>

Usage, Policy, Guidelines to use Simplifier.net
* Growing number of projects
* Management of different FHIR versions of projects
* Requests for projects through jurisdictions?

<strong>Meeting Minutes:</strong>

Recognize there are growing number of Simplifier projects, being charged per project by Firely.
Growing number of Simplifier projects
- Difficult to filter and identify which projects belong to which provinces
- Look to put a nomenclature system in place for Simplifier project names (can be changed without changing project URL link)
- Will need separate projects for different FHIR version releases - even though 2 FHIR profiles can have different FHIR versions, they cannot share the same canonical URL (unless Simplifier starts to support profile versioning)
- Considered option to assign one project per province, but may result in profile/Canonical URL collisions

Simplifier as the long-term solution
- many on the call recognize Simplifier as both an Authoring and Publishing Platform
- Northern Health has been using IG publisher; exploring Simplifier but concerns w version control and licensing
- CIHI has been using IG publisher w custom publishing mechanism; exploring Simplifier but issue w AODA compliance
- Saskatchewan is apparently looking at cloud systems, eg Microsoft Azure, suggested Infoway investigate (T.Zhou)
- the only publication solution that ArtDecor connects to is Simplifier (for BC)
- Ontario, BC Ministry using Simplifier right now
- the only other known large publication on Simplifier is Netherlands
- Trifolia is not as easy to use, and not as feature-rich
- BC Ministry is unable to install tools necessary to use IG Publisher
- Alberta concerned w/ investing resources and choosing Simplifier, if national solution is not yet confirmed [edit: line added 2020-04-06]

Costs
- growing number of projects have cost implication, being charged by Firely per-project
- based on separate discussions w Firely via IHE, does not seem to be much room for negotiation
- licence also limits the number of users who can use Forge at the same time
- once specifications/IGs stable, still need to keep them available on Simplifier as Canadian repository for FHIR specifications
- exporting from Simplifier and publishing to another space will still incur costs, and exporting will not provide rendering for FHIR profiles
- opportunity to sunset older/defunct specifications using Packages (conformance tiles) and IG Export (narrative html), but incomplete solution right now
- look at shared costing per-project between jurisdictions and Infoway

<strong>Action Items:</strong>
Joel to discuss internally with Infoway, and revisit this topic on April 17th Solution Architecture
Joel and Shamil to take first cut at Simplifier project name nomenclature to include Province

Feel free to add any additional comments/minutes I may have missed from my notes, thanks!

- Ken

Hi all,

Please note that tomorrow's occurrence of the timeslot regularly used for Canadian Core Governance (and previously Solution Architecture) will be used to host a discussion chaired by Joel and Shamil re: the Canadian FHIR Registry as it pertains to the policy and usage of Simplifier.net.

With the exception of tomorrow's meeting, this timeslot will continue to be used for Canadian Core Governance agendas.

Thank you!

(p.s. the event on the forum calendar of events displays as FHIR Solution Architecture)

-Mike