Don’t assume your devs have all the answers when it comes to FHIR.
Don’t assume they even know the right questions to ask.
If you’re leading a project that uses FHIR or is considering using FHIR, YOU need to be aware of the questions to ask and the decisions that need to be made.
1. FHIR Regulations
- Are there regulations that mandate the use of FHIR in your country?
- Do those regulations mention a specific version number?
2. Implementation Guides
- Do IGs exist that cover all or some of your product’s domain?
- Should you use them or roll your own?
- Are there industry specific expectations that should be met with IGs?
3. Analytics
- Does the business plan to use the data in FHIR for analytics?
- Are you aware that FHIR is not a database?
- Are you allowed to store this data for analytical use cases?
4. Smart-on-FHIR
- Are you mandated to implement Smart-on-FHIR by regulation?
- Are you aware of industry expectations around Smart-on-FHIR?
5. Beyond Smart-on-FHIR
- Have you considered situations where Smart-on-FHIR is not enough?
- Will you need element level access control?
6. International Considerations
- Different country, different regulations.
- Different country, different Implementation Guides.
- Different country, different terminologies.
Many decisions around healthcare data and FHIR are not technical. Your developers should not be making them.
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