The gap between demo project and production solution is vast. Microsoft’s open source toolkit goes some way to filling that gap.
The Azure Health Data Services Toolkit is a great resource for demonstrating in detail the possible ways of enhancing FHIR. It attempts to fill architectural holes in FHIR workflows, or at least to provide insights into how those holes might be filled.
While the Toolkit targets Azure’s managed FHIR servers and is written in C#, the principals can be applied to other servers, implementations and languages.
Why is this useful?
The official FHIR documentation is light on code and light on technical architecture. It leaves it to the developers and architects to design and build the robustness their solution needs.
The same applies to most articles and posts on FHIR (I include myself here). They tend to target new FHIR users or simple, classroom type use cases.
The Microsoft toolkit goes further and demonstrates in working projects how to implement the following:
– Transforming request and/or response payloads.
– Custom authorization logic (like consent, etc.).
– Organization-specific operations.
– Implementation guide development.
If you’re the lead developer or architect on a FHIR project, spending a day with the toolkit is time well spent.
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