FHIR Demo 2024

Participant #11 / 27

HL7 Finland

FHIR Implementation Guides

HL7 Finland has published several FHIR implementation guides. Recently published ones are the Finnish Base Profiles implementation guide that specifies the Finnish base profiles for FHIR, and the Finnish Implementation Guide for SMART App Launch that specifies guidelines for and examples of using the SMART App Launch mechanism in Finland.

HL7 Finland has also done some early mapping of Nordic FHIR Base Profiles. See the presentation slides of the session Nordic harmonization of health data, given in the Vitalis conference in May, 2023. They include an initial comparison of the Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish base profile specifications. There will be a session on the topic this year too, with other Nordic HL7 affiliates.

Capture of slide 14 of the Vitalis presentation mentioned above
In 2023, Denmark had profiled 5 resource types, Finland and Norway both 20, and Sweden 4 resource types. Only three resource types (Organization, Patient, and Practitioner) were profiled by all countries.

This year one of the main activities is to consolidate the previously published scheduling related implementation guides into one guide, also including the recent input from Kanta implementation guide for appointment record stored to Kanta.

More information is available at hl7.fi/fhir.

Working Groups

HL7 Finland has several active working groups, all of which have some FHIR related activities this year.

  • Technical Committee oversees the ballot process of FHIR implementation guides published by HL7 Finland and coordinates voting in ballots of HL7 International and HL7 Europe.
  • Personal Health SIG organizes workshops that often handle FHIR specific topics. The special interest group has a subgroup that focuses on developments of the national Kanta infrastructure. This includes the fully FHIR based Finnish PRH for health and wellness data collected and governed by citizens, as well as the FHIR API for patient-facing apps accessing information in the clinical part of Kanta repository.
  • IHE Finland is a working group focused on IHE profiles, and also the IHE affiliate for Finland. This year one of the focus areas is in both studying FHIR related IHE profiles in more detail and in presenting them to the local community.
  • OpenEHR Finland is a working group focused on OpenEHR implementation and development in Finland, and also the OpenEHR affiliate for Finland. This year one of the considered activities is to advance mapping between OpenEHR and local FHIR profiles.

Contact

Mikael Rinnetmäki

FHIR Ambassador

mikael@sensotrend.com