There’s a gap in the FHIR documentation.
It’s great for students. It’s filled with detail. But it doesn’t offer much in the way of guidance or insights into building real-world, fully-fledged solutions.
If that’s what you’re looking for, take a look at what the FHIR team at Microsoft are doing.
Here are 5 open source projects they’ve made available to help you ‘productionize’ your FHIR project.
1. Azure Health Data Services Toolkit
A complete C# project that demonstrates how to build caching, middleware channels, and custom operations for your FHIR server.
https://github.com/microsoft/azure-health-data-services-toolkit
2. Convert HL7 messages to FHIR
A command line tool that converts HL7 messages to FHIR R4. It uses customizable liquid templates for the mapping and can be built into a C# project.
https://github.com/microsoft/FHIR-Converter
3. Microsoft’s own open source FHIR server
I use a Docker instance of this on my PC every day. The open source code is the same codebase as Microsoft’s production FHIR servers. Invaluable.
https://github.com/microsoft/fhir-server
Docker instance: https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-healthcareapis-r4-fhir-server
4. Smart on FHIR integration with Azure FHIR
It’s not quite out-of-the-box but it gets you started on building Smart on FHIR into your solution.
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-health-data-and-ai-samples/tree/main/samples/smartonfhir
5. FHIR and DICOM data anonymization
I’m testing this right now against some Synthea bundles. It looks good so far — I’ll post on my progress next week.
https://github.com/microsoft/Tools-for-Health-Data-Anonymization
These are not student projects.
Expect to spend a day or two looking into each one. If you’re a solution architect or lead developer, it’s time well spent.
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