Many projects that use FHIR are greenfield projects.
New project, new technology, new cloud infrastructure — a blank slate.
This often leads management to the false assumption that they can staff the project with new teams and new devs.
So much of what we’re doing is new. Let’s take the opportunity and bring in new blood with new skills and new ways of doing things.
Follow this logic and this is the team you end up with:
- No domain knowledge
- No healthcare data experience
- No terminology expertise
- No exposure to clinical workflows
- No business domain experience
- No privacy and compliance expertise
- And no FHIR knowledge
Each one of these is a problem. Collectively they can derail a project.
The heart of the problem is that often no one sees what’s wrong until the project reaches an advanced demo stage where more experienced heads see it for the first time and start picking it apart.
- The terminology is all wrong.
- Where’s the auditing?
- You’ve built a custom data model. Where’s the interoperability?
- Why are you assuming consistency in HL7 messages?
- You can’t use Patient data for that purpose.
- That’s not what happens in a real hospital!
- And so on…
FHIR may be new but healthcare and healthcare data is old.
While your new project would benefit from FHIR expertise, you still need all the knowledge and experience your existing teams have built up over the years and decades.
That requirement doesn’t go away.
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