Become an SME In FHIR® Standard, Part 1

If you work or would like to work in the healthcare IT space, you have to know FHIR®. The problem is that FHIR learning is primarily available from HL7, and it’s not cheap or easily accessible by any means. Any other training outside of HL7 is cursory, limited, or expensive.

This course offers to remedy that situation; you will get an exceptional and detailed learning experience on the FHIR standard at a minimal cost. The key to FHIR learning is balance. You want to get all the core information without the unnecessary details. This course attempts to do just that. It’s a very fine balancing act that requires years of experience in being able to judge what information is essential and what is extraneous and can be dropped.

Who is the course for?

Anybody who works with FHIR currently and wishes they had a better understanding of it. It’s also for people who want to work in healthcare IT. This goes for any role you can think of, from business analysts to program managers, to IT directors and CIOs in healthcare IT. FHIR is ubiquitous in this space. Even if you worked with FHIR for a while, chances are your understanding is rather shallow, and you would benefit from a thorough basic course on FHIR.

Course Details

The course is divided into 5 sections, excluding the introduction and a conclusion to the course.

• FHIR Intro and Background

• FHIR Resources 1

• FHIR Resources 2

• FHIR REST API

• FHIR Documents

This course is designed for individuals seeking FHIR certification, but it is just the first step. There is a second course that is necessary to pass the certification exam. This course covers all the core topics in FHIR in detail, and the second course covers the remainder.

Learning Strategy

The course is PowerPoint-based with lots of details. The presentation consists mostly of reading the presentation with minimal changes. This is done on purpose because this format works better when the presenter reinforces the exact information that is on the screen rather than adlibbing freely.

If you want a lecture that is only loosely based on the presentation, this course is not for you. Don’t take it.

The reason for this 2-course strategy is not financial but mental. Each course is just too mentally demanding and needs its own space. This split also offers the advantage of providing different stakeholders with a different view on FHIR. Most stakeholders don’t need to understand many of the peripheral and technical FHIR requirements. They just need to understand the core of FHIR, which is exactly what this course offers.

The course is about 3 hours in lectures and another 1.5-2 hours in exercises and tests. The beauty of the course is that one can skip the lectures and just read the slides to get the full picture of the lesson, thus saving oneself some valuable time listening to the audio.

Since this is primarily a conceptual training, there isn’t much room for hands-on training. Nonetheless, the course offers a hands-on walk-through of the original HL7 FHIR documentation, which is quite challenging in its own right.

Additionally, each sub-lesson has a quiz with about 5 open questions and occasionally small exercises. And each lesson/section has a test with 15 questions in multiple-choice format. This is aimed at those who plan on taking the certification test, but of course, every student is encouraged to take these tests and pass them in order to be confident in their understanding of FHIR.