FHIR’s QuestionaireResponse resource has a lot to answer for.
Inadvertently it led to me building the Vanya FHIR viewer. Here’s the backstory.
It was April 2021. We were sitting out the worst of Covid in a villa in the Canary Islands. I’d just landed a remote contract with a US health insurance company.
It was a clinical trial project. I was the lead backend developer and all the data was being stored in a managed FHIR server on Azure.
I’d never heard of FHIR before.
During the interview the tech lead described it as “basically JSON” — which showed a level of misunderstanding that’s common with people new to FHIR.
The key FHIR resources used in the project were Questionnaire and QuestionaireResponse. Verbose is the word comes to mind. These are BIG resources.
2,000 lines of JSON per resource was not uncommon.
Two weeks into the project I threw up my hands and asked the team: “Isn’t there a desktop app I can use to see the data?”
The answer was no. Postman or curl were the way to go. It was a nightmare.
The project ended later in the year, my FHIR knowledge had grown, and the seed had been planted.
Early 2022 we were taking a couple of months downtime in Nerja in Southern Spain. I had time on my hands. I started work on what would become Vanya — an early POC.
Could I get the data out of FHIR and into a grid so it was readable by devs like me?
The answer was yes. That early version of Vanya supported about 20 resource types.
A month later I started a new contract working on a much larger healthcare project and I brought Vanya with me.
For the first time I was using it on a real world project.
The team started using it. The business started using it. The app quickly slipped out of my control and began popping up in sprint demos and business demos.
It provided value.
Turns out Postman was never a good way of showing data to anyone. Who’d have thought?
I added new resource types as I encountered them until by late 2023 all 145 FHIR R4 resource types were loading in Vanya.
The basic MVP was feature complete. It worked. It added value to devs working with FHIR. It made it easy to see the data, which is what it was built for.
So that’s the Vanya origin story. Middle of Covid, a random remote contract, too much time on my hands.
But the story doesn’t end there.
I’m working on a fuller featured commercial version of Vanya. Over the next few months I’ll be releasing some beta versions as new features are added.
The first of these will be FHIR Queries — the ability to run queries on your FHIR server just like you do in Postman and see the results in Vanya.
I’ll post updates as they happen. And you can sign up to be notified by email here: https://vanyalabs.com/Home/Newsletter
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