Three years ago I wrote a post arguing for better tools for developers working with FHIR.
I’d just come out of a contract with a major US health insurance company. It was my introduction to FHIR and it was a frustrating introduction.
The tools I expected to find as a developer did not exist.
FHIR is 10 years old. That’s almost antiquated in tech years, which tend to run at a faster pace than dog years.
Look at what ChatGPT has achieved in only 2 years. Love it or hate it, that’s real progress.
I can’t help but think FHIR should be further along than it is.
Not the standard itself, which moves at a slow pace for a reason, but the surrounding ecosystem.
- We should have better tools.
- We should have more uniformity on best practices.
- We should have documented architectures for building big FHIR solutions.
- We should have better conversion to and from FHIR.
We don’t have any of these things.
In that three year old post I was asking for a desktop client for accessing FHIR APIs. A small ask, from a frustrated developer.
It was 6 months later that I built the first version of the Vanya FHIR Viewer.
Vanya then: https://vanyalabs.com/files/Vanya-version-1.png
Vanya today: https://vanyalabs.com/images/beta/beta5.png
Here’s that first post from 3 years ago.
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