At the HL7 FHIR Connectathon 32 in Henderson, Nevada on January 14-15, 2023 Saffron Labs’ Aaron Seib, who led the Gravity SDOH implementation guide as track-lead at the HL7 Connectathon, shared that he was thrilled by the turn out and the amount of interoperability testing that occurred. The Gravity IG comprehensively defines a set of profiles and FHIR Artifacts that can be implemented to support a full spectrum of exchange patterns among Referral Organizations (Providers, Payers, CBOs and Self), referral Performers and the subject of the referral (e.g. individual, household), ranging from the simplest pairwise exchange between a healthcare entity and a predefined set of Community Based Organizations all the way to a regional ecosystem of multiple stakeholders of each type all using applications of their choice to be able to perform closed loop referrals.
At this first post-Covid, in-person Connectathon Saffron Labs and over 20 contributing participants successfully showed the IGs maturity by having multiple apps and vendors participate in exchange across separately developed code and different backends. The focus of the track was to prove out the multi-participant eco-system implementation model – where various roles in the exchange are performed by different actors against a common FHIR back-end infrastructure – focusing on RESTful APIs as the interop paradigm.
It’s good to recall that the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) Connectathons are unique collaborative engineering exercises that feature hands-on FHIR development and testing. Implementers and developers come together to hold technical discussions that advance the FHIR specification, develop FHIR-based solutions, and exchange data with other FHIR interfaces. Connectathons are a great opportunity to work directly with FHIR developers and senior members of the FHIR standards development team.
“The collaboration and learnings from the Connectathon are so valuable – we are happy to announce that we will continue to host our Connectathon environment and make it freely available to the Track participants and other vendors developing to the open-standards of the Gravity IG.” said Seib, who continued to say “We couldn’t wait until the next Connectathon to keep the collaboration going and we hope to engage the whole community, not just those who participated in Henderson.” To find out more about getting access to the sandbox that we are calling Lab1, let us know you’re interested by registering here.
