FHIR has quickly become a household name in health information interoperability, starting to bleed into the broader user base now. As more and more projects are reaching for FHIR as the delivery mechanism for their interoperability, it is becoming increasingly more relevant and important to consolidate the very building blocks of these FHIR solutions. All FHIR implementations have to decide on a number of elements that determine their solution such as profiles, value sets, extensions, capability statements in addition to building and providing consumable ImplementationGuides for their integrators.
After a careful examination of build environments that support collaborative and reusable patterns for FHIR development, Canada Health Infoway is pleased to announce the launch of the Canadian FHIR Registry a solution powered by the Simplifier.net platform. Simplifier.net is a web solution built by Furore, a Dutch company that is taking painstaking efforts to keeping their code base of the registry in line with the newest developments in the evolution of the FHIR standard. Their technical team is actively engaged in the development of the standard, ensuring that material stored and developed in this environment meets the validation criteria for properly formed FHIR content, being particularly sensitive to versioning.
Furthermore, the Simplifier.net platform has become host to several national FHIR registries giving our users open access to learning and reusing solutions developed and published by others. These traits are needed ingredients to accelerated, sustainable and reusable growth both locally and internationally. The Registry allows for seamless integration of profile editing using Forge (free FHIR profile editor) as well as online authoring of ImplementationGuides using a pleasant, integrated user interface. Integration with source control tools such as GitHub is also supported allowing development teams to create and evolve their FHIR package in version controlled environments and backend syncing of that content through Simplifier.net to the designated project space in the Registry. This approach blends software development best practices with the FHIR modelling needed to deliver on project requirements while having continuous access to structure validation, rendering and publishing.
While the free account only allows for individual, public hosting, the Canadian FHIR Registry, being an Infoway sponsored solution, accommodates collaborative development for project teams of up to 100 individuals.
This is an open call to action to all project managers working on Canadian FHIR based projects to contact the Infoway Standards team (mailto: standards@infoway-inforoute.ca) to request access to a project envelope. There is a lot more content coming in the upcoming months including but not limited to recommended Canadian FHIR profiles, extension tooling, analysis on emerging trends, etc. So come, get engaged and start developing using 21st century technology.
Visit https://infocentral.infoway-inforoute.ca/en/collaboration/wg/fhir-implementations to learn more about ongoing projects done within the Canadian FHIR Community.