The online FHIR community and events like DevDays lean heavily toward the US and Europe.
But that’s a filtered reality.
FHIR is being used all over the world, and hard questions are being asked about how to use it in many countries that are not strongly represented in FHIR discussions.
I got a stark reminder of this in the four weeks since I released my “FHIR Architecture Decisions” book.
The PDF has been downloaded 1,992 times and the ePub version 274 times.
These figures do not include the many readers who picked up a copy from within their organization. A PDF in a Teams or Slack channel, an attachment in an email from a colleague, embedded in a webpage or LinkedIn post.
While the figures are great to see and illustrate a real interest in learning more about early FHIR decisions, what I found particularly encouraging was the number of messages I received from readers and where those messages came from.
There was direct outreach from technical leaders working on national EHRs in two countries in Southeast Asia. There were emails and LinkedIn posts from project leaders in different African countries, many of them focusing on their own FHIR-native implementations and the problems inherent in that approach. And there were messages from architects working on projects for private businesses in South America.
The push to deliver “Prior Authorization” in the US dominates many of the FHIR posts on LinkedIn and other platforms. But its success or failure has little significance outside the US. The rest of the world is carrying on regardless.
If you missed the book last time, you can download a copy here.
And feel free to share it internally amongst your colleagues. I may not see those download figures, but I didn’t write the book for vanity metrics.
---