FHIR Implementers August 2023 Quarterly Community Call - Notes and Links

Hi all!

Thanks very much to everyone who was able to join for yesterday's Quarterly Community Call! Some brief notes below, as well as links shared during the call. As well, you can access the video recording from the Videos tab (from our Landing Page)

1. FHIR North 2023 - Registration & Call for Speakers are open! See links below.

2. Questions and Discussion re: Sun Life / Lumino's FHIR Implementation explorations:

a. COTS platform vs. in-house FHIR platform – to have a generally 'plug-and-play' ready FHIR platform should we really look to COTS?

- Kind of depends on what SL is looking at
- Need to narrow it down to "we're looking at implementing labs, or patient summaries, etc"
- From attendees who've implemented: found out it really accelerates integrations on the internal side, and more and more third party have the knowledge of FHIR as it goes on. It was also a good way to rapidly support persisting new clinical data, in a FHIR store. Also, regarding your architecture, you would probably need to check if you want to implement a FHIR facade or a FHIR store, if you want to expose in FHIR

b. How widespread is FHIR adoption in Canada? Are we building FHIR capabilities when vendors we might work with really aren't even there yet?

- The big HIS vendors are exposing read interfaces, that's been the focus for lots of North America
- Queries are starting to get into FHIR
- Things like updating and sharing information is still nascent
- But there's a growing SMART on FHIR presence
- Huge amount of work happening in payer space re: the DaVinci project
- But lots of progress on exposing patient and provider registries using FHIR
- Ultimately not much more than read-only is in production
- Even if a system supports FHIR, to do an actual integration they need to align on the version and IG. But then there is a lot less to change when 90% of the mapping is done already and can be reused.

3. Open Mic
- In Ontario they're looking at healthcareprovider directory and bi-directional eReferral
- HL7 Canada community is discussing better maintaining the Canadian URI Registry

4. Stream Updates

SMART North

- great development from Telus CHR – able to do a smart launch from a patient's chart
- Can do contextual launch
- Working on SMART North implementation guide
- Epic is looking at doing something similar specific to the Champlain region

CA Baseline

- Looking at material coming out of HL7 intl on accountabilities
- MS flag cleanup

Links shared during call:

FHIR North Call for Speakers submission: forms.gle/gcGhsGXkV1iJTcm27
FHIR North Tickets and registration: na.eventscloud.com/fhirnorth2023
PrescribeIT Specs: specs.prescribeit.ca/R5.3/
Nat'l Directory of Healthcare Providers and Services (US) iGuide: hl7.org/fhir/us/ndh/2023Sep/
Info on $everything operation: hl7.org/fhir/R4/patient-operation-everything.html