HL7 India Youtube Channel
Justification and Objectives
HL7 V2 is the current workhorse of healthcare interoperability. However, FHIR has become an increasingly popular standard and is already being utilized very heavily by stand-alone healthcare apps/ services as well as external services such as governmental agencies to obtain and share information with EMRs. The fundamental differences between the two standards in terms of their philosophy as well as representation of data gives rise to a need to map from HL7 V2 messages to appropriate FHIR resources and perhaps even vice versa. This particularly assumes importance in the Indian context because use of FHIR in India is still very limited but is expected to grow in the near future.
The primary objective of this track is to test and possibly even build V2-to-FHIR mappings. By the end of the track we expect to have validated some of the existing mappings and possibly build some new mappings.
This track will use the R4 version of FHIR.
Pre-requisites
- If you are not functionally familiar with FHIR, please view the following two introductory videos available on HL7 India channel on YouTube. These are recordings of our pre-connectathon meetings:
- If you are not familiar with the mappings produced by the V2-FHIR project of HL7 International, please view the following video, also on the HL7 India channel on YouTube:
Software requirements for the Track
- Postman HTTP client (download here) or similar
- Microsoft FHIR-Converter (installation instructions document here)
- Notepad++ (download here) or similar editor
- (optional) HL7 Soup or similar V2 editor
Track Leads
Amrit Palaria amrit.palaria@314ecorp.com
Ravi Athmanathan ravi.athmanathan@philips.com
Track Schedule
Friday, 03-July | |
• Inauguration (3:00 - 4:00 PM) • Short Break (4:00 - 4:15 PM) • Review mapping (4:15 - 5:00 PM) • Setup for Saturday (5:00 - 6:00 PM) | |
Saturday, 04-July | |
• Session 1 (10:00 AM - noon) • Short Break (noon - 12:15 PM) • Session 2a (12:15 - 1:15 PM) • Lunch Break (1:15 - 2:15 PM) • Session 2b (2:15 - 4:00 PM) • Snack Break (4:00 - 4:30 PM) • Session 3 (4:30 - 7:00 PM) | • ADT^A01/ A03/ A04 • ORU^R01 • ORU^R01 • MDM^T02 |
Sunday, 05-July | |
• Review (9:00 - 10:45 AM) • Short Break (10:45 - 11:00 AM) • Report out (11:00 AM - noon) | |
Pre-Connectathon Activities
A recording of "Introduction to FHIR data model" talk on June-24, 2020 is available here.
A recording of "Introduction to FHIR API" talk on June-27, 2020 is available here.
Track Scenario - Convert HL7 V2 messages of interest to FHIR resources
Action: Build and test V2-to-FHIR mappings for V2 event types of interest including various case scenarios. Mappings available on FHIR website could be a good starting point. There are further updated mappings from the HL7 V2-to-FHIR project.
Precondition: The participants have a set of HL7 V2 messages to work with, and they possess an understanding of these messages.
Success Criteria: The FHIR resources generated with data from V2 messages successfully post to the FHIR server. The participant can verify that the resources carry the appropriate content, either manually or by viewing the data on the app or EMR front-end.
Bonus point: Use of a code to do automatic conversion based on given mappings would make this process faster.
Expectations from Participants
This track will build and test V2 to FHIR mappings, some of which are already available from the HL7 community (https://github.com/HL7/v2-to-fhir). If already available, the participants would be expected to test out the mappings by generating FHIR resources from V2 messages and then posting the resources to a FHIR server. A few sample messages would be provided before the Connectathon session to use during the session. The participants are very welcome to bring their own V2 messages that they would like to work with. We also invite participants to contribute real business use messages to the track for testing. Please see the Security and Privacy Considerations section below.
The participants can choose to generate FHIR resources from the V2 messages manually using the maps, they can choose to use their own proprietary code for the conversion, or they can use the open source FHIR converter from Microsoft (https://github.com/microsoft/FHIR-Converter#:~:text=Right%20now%2C%20the%20FHIR%20Converter,transform%20them%20into%20FHIR%20bundles.)
Participants are expected to have some basic understanding of HL7 V2 and FHIR standards. They should know how to post FHIR resources to a FHIR server (using, for example, a client utility such as Postman) and interpret the response. (For beginners, some of this understanding may also be gained from the FHIR Starter Track in the Connectathon.)
System Roles
FHIR server: A FHIR server would be needed to post or update FHIR resources based on V2 data. This could be a test server or the participant’s proprietary server with optionally an EMR or app front-end to view the data. A list of freely available test servers can be found here.
Security and Privacy Considerations
The starting HL7 V2 messages the participants work with should be de-identified when working on a test server or when sharing the messages with other participants. Or if working with real data on proprietary server, the data should not be shared.