Project Yosemite, SMART on FHIR, and the Argonauts

The Argonaut Project is a collaboration between Health industry vendors like McKesson, Epic, Meditech and so forth, along with the Mayo Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, to provide the necessary resources to complete the work of the upcoming HL7 FHIR DSTU (Draft Standard for Trial Use). As Grahame Grieve elaborates on OpenHealthNews, Argonaut is aimed at three particular pieces of work:

1. Security
2. CCDA to FHIR Mapping
3. FHIR Implementation Testing

This work is intended for completion by May 2015. As described, the Security piece initially involves SMART on FHIR®, a platform developed by Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, implementing open standards for healthcare data, authorization, and UI integration. For authorization, SMART uses OAuth2, a profile for which will most likely become built in to the FHIR standard.

Josh Mandel, the lead architect behind SMART on FHIR® also spoke recently as part of a series on  of five presentations on Project Yosemite, held by SemanticWeb.org and DataVersity. Project Yosemite began a year or so ago with the Yosemite Manifesto, which establishes RDF (the Resource Description Framework that underlies the Semantic Web and Linked Data) as the best candidate for a universal healthcare exchange language. Project Yosemite follows two paths, "Standards" and "Translation", based on the premise that standards adoption is of primary importance, but that there will always be a need to translate between standards, and even between versions of the same standard.

The idea here is that once you build ontological mappings of various healthcare standards into RDF representations, then Semantic mapping tools like SPINMap and TopQuadrant's TopBraid can be used to construct robust migration/translation layers. This is the first step in producing a distributed network of Linked Health providers, similar to the work currently taking place with Linked Data. At this point, the presentation recordings from DataVersity are not yet all available, but they are definitely worth watching.

HL7 FHIR provides a potential successor to several HL7 standards currently in use internationally. Migration is a critical success factor here, and Project Yosemite presents a different way to approach migration. Perhaps coincidentally, RDF and FHIR are both resource-based approaches; RSS is a syndication format that emerged from work with RDF, and FHIR uses a similar syndication format, Atom, to aggregate and compose health resources, like Patient and Observation.

Project Yosemite benfits FHIR and Project Argonaut, Argonaut accelerates the first phase of ONC Data Access Framework (DAF) project. Project Yosemite is involved with ICD-11. This seems like lot of convergence, and the next 6 months will really show how much. It's a great time to get involved.