The FHIR learning curve is deceptive.
Things look easy when they’re not. The gap from student project to production app is vast.
Worse — it’s a hidden gap. You don’t know it’s there until you trip and fall in.
Developers come to FHIR with a set of skills and experiences that should make learning FHIR easy, but in practice make it hard.
- APIs are easy. We use them all the time.
- Queries are easy. We’re comfortable with query strings.
- Resources are easy. They’re just objects.
- Data types are easy. Every language has them.
- Postman is easy. Familiar.
- And we love the SDK. Makes everything so easy.
Some things look easy to begin with but become hard later on, when the gap appears and we realize how much we got wrong.
- Extensions. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
- Profiles. Doesn’t feel like programming.
- Smart on FHIR. Never as simple as the article said it was.
- Data retention. You can’t keep the data just because you want to.
- Analytics. A six month project you thought you didn’t need.
And then there’s the elephant in the room that nobody takes seriously until it almost derails the project near the finish line.
- Terminology. You can’t just make it up!
When it comes to FHIR, not everything that looks easy is easy.
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