Recently, Webtools Senior Developer, Matt de Haan, completed a six-week FHIR® intermediate course. The course is designed for those who are already familiar with FHIR and want to dive deeper, building their knowledge of what is required to use the standard for real world projects.
So, what is FHIR? FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) is an HL7® specification for healthcare interoperability. It’s an interoperability standard created to exchange medical and other related healthcare information between systems and it's quickly becoming the de facto healthcare data exchange standard.
Through completing the course, Matt developed an even broader understanding of the entire FHIR ecosystem and how to work with it, greatly expanding on his pre-existing knowledge. Concepts were introduced using real life scenarios and would often discuss how solutions can change depending on the business use or requirements.
Key takeaways included a greater understanding of how to work with FHIR resources to store medical data and how to use implementation guides to achieve interoperability. The course also covered the mechanisms of FHIR servers and clients and how they can be used in different contexts to query and store medical data. This deeper knowledge of FHIR is something that Matt can draw on when working with storing and retrieving resources within our own systems or external systems.
Since completing the course, Matt has been able to share new concepts and ideas back to our team. This improved understanding of what’s required to make systems interoperable using FHIR will help to continue to improve our systems and processes.
These learnings equip Matt and the wider Webtools team with the knowledge to continue to develop interoperable and standards-based solutions that make a difference to the healthcare of kiwis – something we are hugely passionate about!
