FUNDAMENTALS

Today I start a FUNDAMENTALS course to learn about FHIR – FHIR stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources and it will become a system for COLLECTIVE effort and communication across the people, teams and institutions providing, guiding, and using health care services.

I need to start with the FUNDAMENTALS to learn JUST ENOUGH to enter this COLLECTIVE and find my NICHE, ultimately to find the right BALANCE.  BALANCE of what you may ask.

The short answer is 42 – but finding the question for that answer may be more complicated than learning FHIR.

The longer answer takes understanding why I need to learn about FHIR.  We have established the system for keeping current with the massive flow of clinical evidence and guidance, for critically evaluating it to understand what can be trusted and how well it can be trusted, for synthesizing it to see what we know when looking at it COLLECTIVEly, and relaying it in easy-to-use formats to provide JUST ENOUGH information for clinicians during practice. We have established a large NICHE in the medical information ecosystem to meet our mission of providing the most useful information to health care professionals at the point of care – to relay and support clinical excellence.  But the world is changing and the point of care is increasingly moving virtually to be necessary to engage interoperably with electronic health information systems. We need to engage the FHIR Opportunity to Relay Clinical Excellence. So it is time to learn the FUNDAMENTALS to understand the FORCE.

I do strive to seek BALANCE in the FORCE, though such concepts haven’t always worked out so well...