One of the most common mistakes made on FHIR projects is assuming that all decisions that need to be made are technical. This leads to “ownership” of FHIR passing to the technical team.
Once that happens responsibility for key decisions around FHIR start being made by technical architects and developers and not by the business.
From that point on every subsequent decision makes things worse.
Why does this happen?
From the outside looking in, FHIR appears to be technical.
It’s an API. That’s technical. The dev teams build APIs and work with APIs every day.
It’s a data format. Populating and using data is technical. Another reason to assume it belongs with the dev teams.
Underneath the API is a database of one kind or another. Doesn’t get more technical than that.
Everyone is talking about JSON. Definitely technical.
It sits in the cloud infrastructure — on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud. The technical teams own the cloud infrastructure. It’s a key part of what they do, so they should own FHIR as well.
Lots of reasons why FHIR appears to be technical and why devs or architects are given ownership of it.
What’s missing is the bigger picture. The implementation side of FHIR IS technical, but many of the key decisions around it are not.
Business decisions come first, technical implementation follows.
The business needs to “own” FHIR from the start and work with the technical teams to implement it in the correct way.
That “correct way” must flow from the business requirements and user expectations.
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