A little bit tongue in cheek! I think it’s safe to expect an abundance of bad puns over the next couple of years with the rising profile of the FHIR protocol.
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the FHIR protocol which is being spearheaded by Grahame Grieve. It’s a protocol I have a personal desire to see become successful since it really hits home on addressing all the points I made in my now (in)famous post about the Rise and Fall of HL7. That post was the first domino that set things into action.
I like simplicity and FHIR is the best thing to come out of the HL7 organization since the original version 2.X protocol. Other people have their opinions – I’ll just go and don my FHIR proof suit at this point… (haha, sorry I did warn you about all the puns).
Jayant Singh who is becoming a prominent blogger in the health informatics sphere immediately jumped in and demonstrated how FHIR could be implemented using C#. Just for kicks I asked if he would be up to trying the same with IGUANA.
I was surprised – Jayant rose to the challenge! He downloaded IGUANA and a day later shocked me with a working FHIR demo – not bad after no experience in the platform. Anyway Jayant and I traded code a little – I showed a few little tricks of how to package up his FHIR module neatly in Lua. Jayant then went and produced a video. I showed the video to Art my Communications Director who found some crazy service to put a voice over on the whole thing. Jayant polished it up and in record time we had the resulting video. If you are curious as to what a simple FHIR interaction looks like this a very fast way to see it in action.
What’s neat about it is that it shows how easy this standard is to implement and how nicely it will play with the existing infrastructure of deployed HL7 Version 2.X technology. This is not a standard which will take years to adopt – it will be possible to get fast benefits out of this puppy.
Here’s to Jayant – nice job!