The most useful posts in this topic, by likes from the community.
Since three years I spend most of my working time between hospital systems, and the most common message I get from other developers is some version of: "the customer says we need FHIR, what is it and how bad is it?" So here is the introduction I wish someone had given me. It is not complete. It is the part you need in the first two weeks. What FHIR actually is FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources,…
Before I became an engineer I was a nurse for six years, the last three on a cardiology ward. I want to describe one thing from that time, because I see the same pattern now in software: in dashboards, in on-call rotations, and in the apps we build for clinicians. On a night shift you hear alarms all the time. The monitor alarms when a patient turns over and an electrode slips. It alarms when the saturation probe…
Last time I promised something about HL7 v2. Here it is. If FHIR is the modern REST API, v2 is the message format that has been running inside hospitals since the late eighties, and it still carries most of the admissions, lab orders and results today. You will meet it, even in a "FHIR project", because something behind the FHIR facade still speaks v2. What a message looks like…
On the last Sunday of October most of Europe goes back from summer time to standard time, and the hour from 02:00 to 03:00 happens twice. For most software this is a small annoyance. In a hospital it can mean a dose documented twice, or an infusion total calculated over the wrong number of hours. Siobhan wrote a very good story here some weeks ago about a renewal test that failed one night a year. This is the…
