On October 7, 2022, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) project released a Draft TEFCA Facilitated FHIR Implementation Guide. As described in an earlier post, the project released a specific plan for integrating HL7 Fast Health Information Resources (FHIR) into the architecture that was defined explicitly in a new Roadmap for later implementation. This draft implementation guide (IG) provides the initial proposed details for this functionality. TEFCA only poses technical requirements on its direct participants, the Qualified Health Information Networks, or QHINs, but they are not the actual sources nor destinations of the data. The actual “FHIR details” are sketchy in this IG; maybe that is by design. It seems to specify just what the QHIN needs to know to do patient discovery and move the query and response around rather than any specifics on where a query originates nor where the response goes, let alone what data is contained.

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As described in the first three posts in this series, today’s patient portals are inherently flawed and doomed to mediocrity. The result is that today’s patient portals cannot achieve a critical mass of adoption and utilization, and therefore portals can’t achieve network effects. In this post, we will: Summarize key points from the first three posts in this series; Explain how today’s patient portals miss out on three types of network effects; Explain the implications: why tomorrow’s portals must be reconfigured to achieve network effects

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The HLN Consulting team attended the HL7 36th Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting (WGM) held in Baltimore, MD, September 17 – 23, 2022. More than 500 attendees, representing all aspects of the industry, were a part of the WGM in-person meeting after 2 years of virtual meetings. The seven day event started on Saturday with a weekend connectathon. This meeting offered an opportunity for attendees to come together and collaborate. It was a valuable meeting especially for people involved in standards development around healthcare. Read More »

Open source is a flourishing and beneficial ecosystem that publicly solves problems in communities and industries using software developed through a decentralized model and community contributions. Over the years, this ecosystem has grown in number and strength among hobbyists and professionals alike. It's mainstream now—even proprietary companies use open source to build software. With the ecosystem booming, many developers want to get in and build new open source projects. The question is: How do you achieve that successfully? This article will demystify the lifecycle and structure of open source projects. I want to give you an overview of what goes on inside an open source project and show you how to build a successful and sustainable project based on my personal experience.

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Open source software (OSS), once a niche segment of the development landscape, is now ubiquitous. This growth is fantastic for the open source community. However, as the usage of OSS increases, so do concerns about security. Especially in mission-critical applications— think medical devices, automobiles, space flight, and nuclear facilities—securing open source technology is of the utmost priority. No individual entity, whether developers, organizations, or governments, can single-handedly solve this problem. The best outcome is possible when all of them come together to collaborate. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) formed to facilitate this collaboration.

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When I was around 5 years old, my father brought home our first computer. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in computers. I haven't stopped hanging around them since. During high school, when considering which specific area I wanted to focus on, I started experimenting with hacking, and that was the moment I decided to pursue a career as a security engineer. I'm now a software engineer on the security compliance team. I've been at Red Hat for over two years, and I work remotely in the Czech Republic. Outside of my day job, I play blind football, and I'm involved in various projects connecting visually impaired and sighted people together, including working in a small NGO that runs activities for blind and visually impaired people. I'm also working on an accessible Fedora project currently called Fegora, an unofficial Linux distribution aimed at visually impaired users.

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Friction across multiple patient portals dramatically limits their usefulness—there’s no practical way for patients OR providers to reconcile and integrate information and workflow. This is the third post in our series on patient portals. We’ve used platform terminology and concepts to explain why today’s patient portals are doomed to mediocrity. Let’s recap: The first post in this series introduced the platform terminology of single-homing vs.multihoming. Patients strongly would prefer to have as few portals as possible — ideally one, i.e., a single “home”. The second post described the difference between stand-alone value and network value. Today’s patient portals can provide some stand-alone value, but they provide minimal network value. In this post we’ll discuss the pitfalls of friction across multiple portals. Your mom having seven portals is more than just inconvenient—it’s dangerous.

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