Arriving at FHIR Camp, Cascais, Portugal and Day 1

By Gaurav Pradhan

This was our first official participation in a business symposium, and what better way than to start in a FHIR Camp. We came across FHIR Camp 2024 in a LinkedIn post shared by Health Samurai. Upon research, we found it to be an effective platform to communicate and collaborate with other interoperability leaders from the industry. We planned our logistics accordingly and landed at the beautiful city of Cascais, Portugal.

The venue added beauty and calm to the event, and we had interesting sessions and intense coffee breaks to follow up with.

Some of the key takeaways from the sessions and discussions that will always be relevant and provide context to any health data interoperability enthusiast:

• FHIR Specification is not just another specification. It’s genesis was because there was a need for an accommodative health data exchange standard which has the best concepts from other specifications, can be flexible to build custom concepts with a standardized mechanism that is easy to implement and easy to comprehend.
• FHIR, by design, is flexible and customizable. It behaves as a boon as well as vice, and it depends on where you stand in principle of standardization vs customization spectrum
• In future, FHIR specification may look at enhancing terminology access and identifier validation, along with improving Provenance and addition of other Resources and custom profiles
• Community is going to play a key role in improving FHIR specification – introducing new interoperability use cases and implementation guides, constraint design principles and consent management mechanisms

Grahame Grieve, Lloyd McKenzie, Diego Kaminker, Gino Canessa and Ewout Kramer were kind enough to share their anecdotes of their FHIR journey.

Few salient points were discussed related to Future of FHIR and the concerns associated with the specification:

• R6 is going to come soon, but R4 is still a popular version that is going to stay!
• Is there anything after FHIR? Frankly, no one knows! FHIR is the best thing that we have now, but we cannot promise that it is going to stay forever
• Clinicians need to be involved in the decision making on various aspects of the specification. There are very few clinicians at present who are involved in the process
• Identify new avenues to scale up FHIR community across the globe and include diverse members and stakeholders
• Improve cross-pollination between different communities to enable seamless interoperability
• Efficient mechanism to deal with upgrades, constraints and validation testing
• Imagine a World with decentralized regulatory governance framework, more power in the hands of individuals breeding a ‘Open Health Data System for Citizens’
• Watch out for ‘AI Company Invested Money Bubble’ as VC firms who look for high profitability may lose on the overall value and many great ideas may die a troubled death!

We concluded our day with a group walk along the beach and beautiful streets of Cascais, exploring the diverse culture, rich heritage and delicious seafood cuisine and get a first-hand experience!

What a way to close the day! Stay tuned for updates on Day 2 and Day 3.

N.B: Please reach out to us at gaurav@strategnosys.com to call out, add or modify the article.

Happy Reading!