You learn 10 times more by doing than by reading.
This is an old maxim that applies to FHIR as much as to any other area.
To that end, I encourage anyone who wants to learn about FHIR or to improve their understanding of FHIR to start using FHIR themselves. Apply what you learn.
If you’re new to FHIR, here are three Postman tasks for you. Try performing them against the public Firely test server. See if you can do each task using a single query.
- Run a query to get all appendectomy procedures.
- Another query to get all Practitioners who participated in an emergency Encounter.
- Finally, try to get all patients who had a blood pressure reading above 130/80.
Postman: https://www.postman.com/
Firely Server URL: https://server.fire.ly
If you’ve been using FHIR for a while and consider yourself not a beginner, try these three tasks. They’re a bit more complicated.
- Set up a local FHIR server in a Docker container.
- Add a new Encounter resource containing a nested extension you just created.
- Create a new SearchParameter that allows you to run a search query against a value in that extension and test it.
I encourage everyone who wants to learn FHIR to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.
I’ve described how to do all of these tasks in posts over the past year. If you need any help, click the search box and search for what you need.
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