I worked on a FHIR project a few years ago where all the wrong decisions were made.
- The wrong FHIR server
- The wrong architectural model
- The wrong multi-tenancy approach
- The wrong data mapped in the wrong way
This was a big company with decades of experience in healthcare data. But they made the same mistakes that I see startups make all the time.
How could this happen?
The technical team didn’t understand their own project requirements. The business was populated by multiple management layers and by isolated departments who owned key areas of responsibility.
The result was a technical team in the dark on what the business expected and what customers needed.
Early architectural decisions were made from a position of ignorance.
- They didn’t know which countries they were building for
- They couldn’t answer data location questions: cloud or on-prem?
- They didn’t know if they needed a FHIR server
- They didn’t know how data was reaching them from different providers
- They didn’t even know who those providers were
The team was given a happy path scenario and told to build against that.
“We can always change it later,” was the message.
We all know how that turns out. Later never comes. Senior management forgets that the current implementation was a “temporary” solution.
This is the gap I wrote “FHIR Architecture Decisions” to address.
Chapter 3 forces you to think about key questions that affect your architecture choices at the start of a project – before you make key decisions.
If you can’t answer these questions, you should not be making key decisions about architectural approaches and FHIR servers.
The book is now publicly available. No sign-up required.
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