Within the UK, there are many system suppliers, trusts and other projects adopting FHIR and actively working with the standard. Within this environment, as the various tools and services are explored, there are a core set of organisations that keep featuring in discussions.
HL7
HL7
HL7 is the first place that most people will land when looking for information about FHIR is the HL7 website. The site itself contains the de facto standard for FHIR resources and one of the most important places on the web for FHIR content.
Endeavour Health
Endeavour Health is a charity set up to promote the adoption of healthcare IT and encourage innovation with the field. While they have a number of projects, one of which is FHIR interoperability. This lead to their involvement with INTEROPen and the creation of a few tools to support adoption of FHIR.
NHS Digital
https://developer.nhs.uk/ is home for developers creating software for healthcare with the UK, this site provides information and tools to help designers and developers create a variety of applications for the NHS. A wide variety of content exists within this site and it can be a little challenging to navigate the collection of hierarchical menus to arrive at the content required.
An important influence on the Care Connect FHIR project is GP Connect. Technical information relating to GP Connect is being transferred from the NHS Developer website to GitHub. Further to this, non-technical overview can be found at the NHS Digital Website. The GP Connect implementation guide is found on the NHS Developer website rather than the GitHub library. At the time of writing a reference server is currently under development.
NHS England and Code4Health
Code4Health is an NHS initiative established for individuals and organisations providing a platform to bring together ideas, change working practice and build solutions to improve healthcare. Code4Health supports a rich asset and resource catalogue, a multitude of contributors and a sandpit environment for communities.
Code4Health focuses on supporting the clinician in the use of technology facilitating shared learning for the ‘frontline’ of healthcare.
There are four strands to Code4Health.
- The first is the Code4health platform, built by Handi, which is used as a testing and development environment to build apps. The platform also provides direct access to open application programming interfaces (APIs).
- The second is a series of courses, such as “how to build an app in a day”, aimed at clinicians. As of 2015 around 200 have attended the training days, which are open to clinicians regardless of previous experience or skills, including those who “aren’t IT literate at all”. Code4Health is also planning to run a “data in a day” course, designed to help clinicians understand how to use data. They might be able to use it to track real-time triage processes in an A&E department, for example.
- The third strand of Code4Health is all about communities. Code4health has become the home of several open-source projects and some of the communities are built around specific software, such as OpenMaxims, the open-source electronic patient record system that went live at Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust in an NHS-first in September 2015. Others have been created around local initiatives or specific topics and interests. One of these is the 111/Urgent & Emergency Care community, which aims to share knowledge and expertise across the UK to drive new technology and innovation in the space.
- The fourth strand is a series of challenges that they sponsor across the country, such as the NHS Hack Days. Code4Health tackles issues present in the healthcare system with a view of coding the solution with the attending participants. These events are not only beneficial to the NHS, but also raise awareness of the core issues and stimulate innovation and creativity for those wanting to make a difference.
Furore Health Informatics
Furore is a health IT company based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The company was founded in 1993. Furore has been involved in FHIR since the early beginning of FHIR in 2012 and they offer tools, consultancy, training and events related to FHIR. Their customers are vendors, care providers and SDOs (the national organizations responsible for standards). Furore is responsible for the FHIR registry ‘Simplifier.net’ and the desktop application ‘Forge’. They support the Microsoft .NET community through the official .NET FHIR API and the Spark FHIR Server (both open source).