OpenEMR and FHIR

OpenEMR Development
3

Hi Greg,

Hope you are well.

I am pleased to inform you that there has been some progress on this effort, but it is far from done (decent undertaking, as you have mentioned):

  1. The project has been noted as a core project on our development roadmap!

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  1. Although this project has to do more with big data analytics and our awesome new data team has been “handed off” the concept, I began looking into what it would take to generate a realistic fake data source for FHIR: NAMCS FHIR Solution · Issue #1 · MatthewVita/fake-patient-web · GitHub - I am trying to “kill two birds with one stone” here because we, the OpenEMR community, are trying to be more “university friendly”. This means that by working on FHIR data projects with realistic data will appeal to bioinformatics departments as well as give OpenEMR great test data for the FHIR project. This is a “bonus” project and isn’t directly related to the FHIR work but I believe it will a great “advertisement” for when we tell the world (in the form of a press release :slight_smile:) that we support FHIR and have 300,000 realistic patient records (as you know, good patient data is hard to come by!)

  2. I spent some time thinking about a PHP-based implementation approach here:
    Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Integration - #18 by MatthewVita - one of the interesting things with this approach is that we would be forced to really focus on the backend modernization work to separate the business/domain logic from the view because the FHIR layer will need to hit a service layer and we don’t want to copy/paste queries and business/domain logic.

  3. I spent some time testing out a very good Docker solution for FHIR resource consumption: https://github.com/jamesagnew/hapi-fhir/tree/master/hapi-fhir-jpaserver-example (you’ll notice the author is James Agnew, who gave us the original Java HAPI HL7 library so you know the solution will be very high quality). Basically, this tool will help us debug/prove our OpenEMR FHIR implementation in a very transparent and standard way.

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  1. ViSolve (@visolveemr, @visolve) has written up some good points about their experience with a custom Java server-based FHIR implementation (read from Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Integration - #26 by visolveemr and on). It turns out that they are considering handing off this code to the OpenEMR community so that will be a decent effort in terms of testing, documentation, and maybe thinking of ways we can move the code into the PHP codebase as discussed in point 3 (however, I still think a Docker will be needed because FHIR validation/parsing is much better in the Java ecosystem at this point).

This is an essential project and I just don’t have the cycles to work on it with the OpenEMR Cloud and OpenEMR cTAKES projects I am working on. I would love to have you be the lead on it given that you have started on a Rails solution and are familiar with the spec. First task would be exploring that FHIR viewer I linked and getting in touch with ViSolve (you can CC me and the other project admins).

Sorry for answering your question of “what’s the update?” with “here’s the update, and please lead the effort” :). I understand that you may have not signed up for this, but do note that our community always does best when passionate people work on areas of the system that interest them and their users! No pressure though, so please do let me know your thoughts!

Thanks,
Matthew

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