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The Hidden Business Intelligence Goldmine: Why Smart Healthcare Leaders Join FHIR Communities
Last week, with Radio National playing in the background as I did household chores, I heard sociologist Mark Granovetter discussing his famous “Strength of Weak Ties” theory from 1973. This research showed that loose professional connections—acquaintances rather than close colleagues—are often more valuable for discovering new opportunities and information. These weak ties act as bridges between different professional circles, bringing fresh perspectives and unexpected opportunities.
This got me thinking about what makes HL7 Australia’s community uniquely powerful in today’s healthcare landscape.
Where healthcare’s decision influencers gather
FHIR communities bring together a mix of people you won’t find anywhere else: clinical informatics specialists working alongside software architects, policymakers debating implementation details with startup founders, and CIOs sharing challenges with international standards experts. This isn’t your typical industry conference networking—it’s where healthcare’s interoperability future gets shaped in real-time.
For organisations still watching from the sidelines, here’s what you’re missing.
Intelligence that money can’t buy
When a health service provider’s system architect explains their current data integration headaches at a working group session, you’re hearing tomorrow’s procurement requirements before they hit the market. When a clinician describes workflow challenges during implementation discussions, you’re learning about problems your competitors won’t discover until the RFP process begins—if they’re lucky.
This intelligence would cost serious money through traditional market research channels. In FHIR communities, it flows naturally through collaborative work sessions and technical discussions.
Consider this: your technical team collaborating with a health service’s interoperability specialists on implementation guides isn’t just advancing standards—they’re building trust and demonstrating competence directly with the people who influence purchasing decisions. When your engineers help solve complex integration challenges in working groups, they’re showcasing expertise that translates into customer confidence and competitive advantage.
Partnerships that work
Successful healthcare technology partnerships can start in FHIR communities. An EHR vendor collaborating with an app developer during a Connectathon might discover synergies that evolve into formal partnerships, expanding both companies’ market reach. These relationships will likely have stronger foundations than traditional business development approaches because they’re built on proven technical collaboration and a mutual understanding of capabilities.
The long-game advantage
Here’s where many organisations get it wrong—they treat FHIR community participation as a short-term technical exercise or a compliance chore rather than a strategic investment. The health system architect you meet at a Connectathon might not have budget authority today, but they could be evaluating vendors eighteen months from now. Maintaining these connections through ongoing standards work ensures you’re positioned when opportunities arise.
Leading organisations understand this. They don’t send junior developers – they deploy their most capable technical architects and product managers who can simultaneously advance standards work and identify business opportunities.
From compliance to competitive advantage
Ready to transform your FHIR community participation? Here’s how you can approach it:
- Align participation with strategy. Map your involvement to your roadmap and target market priorities rather than treating it as a generic technical activity.
- Send your A-team. Deploy people who can contribute meaningfully while identifying opportunities – your technical architects, decision-makers, and product managers who understand both technology and business implications.
- Fail early and safely. Connectathons enable you to see that your products really do interoperate. Your competitors will help with that, as you will help them – in an environment where everyone wins technically. After all, if you want sharing by default to underpin a strategic advantage for your products, then others must be capable of that too.
- Create intelligence processes. Establish systematic approaches for capturing and sharing community insights across your organisation. What gets learned in working groups should inform product development, sales strategies, and market positioning.
- Measure business impact. Track relationships formed, opportunities identified, and partnerships developed through FHIR engagement. Treat it like any other business investment.
- Shape the agenda. Don’t just respond to community priorities – influence them. Proactively advocate for activity streams that align with your strategic interests.
Individual career benefits
For professionals, FHIR communities offer something increasingly rare: access to diverse knowledge networks that span technical, clinical, and business domains at both hands-on and insight levels. Career advancement isn’t just about technical expertise, though you will improve that in FHIR communities as well – it’s about positioning yourself where different professional worlds intersect.
The beauty of standards work is its natural networking maintenance cycle. Regular work group sessions, Connectathons, webinars and other events provide built-in touchpoints for maintaining professional relationships without requiring separate relationship management efforts. Plus, standards work is inherently international while remaining locally relevant, creating ideal conditions for building connections that span geographic and cultural boundaries.
The membership advantage
Whether you’re an organisation looking for competitive intelligence or a professional seeking career advancement, HL7 Australia membership maximises your exposure to these opportunities. It’s your gateway to a community where healthcare’s future gets decided through collaborative work rather than corporate boardrooms.
The question isn’t whether valuable intelligence and opportunities exist in FHIR communities—they do. The question is whether your people are there to discover and leverage them.
Ready to transform your FHIR community participation from compliance activity to competitive advantage? Learn more about HL7 Australia membership and upcoming community events, including our next webinar (12 June) and Connectathon (1-2 September in Brisbane) at hl7.org.au.
David Rowlands - Chair at HL7 Australia
Pragmatic Interoperability, a FHIR Starter
What is your pathway to HL7 FHIR?
I’ve been asked many times about where to start with FHIR, and the answer is “It Depends”. Why does it depend? It depends on the use case that you are dealing with.
It is a large standard and can be daunting on where to begin.
Are you looking to replace a legacy integration pattern with more modern RESTful APIs?
Are you trying to interact with an existing FHIR implementation?
Are you wanting to open data access for mobility and need an international standard that you can point developers to, to fast-track adoption?
Regardless of where in the standard you want to start, I would take an incremental approach. HL7 FHIR is all about the implementation – a standard to be implemented, and not a theoretical exercise. I call this Pragmatic Interoperability. Pragmatic – because you must be practical about what you can do. Sometimes you are working with legacy applications that cannot easily be updated to natively support FHIR. In these cases, you may need to consider alternative approaches including creating facades or using middleware to transform the data to FHIR.
With Pragmatic Interoperability, start with your use case in mind. The use case could be something like a patient questionnaire assessment tool, or a clinical task management application. But, for our example, we will consider a use case where we want to provide the ability for patients to update their contact details within an application, then let’s see how these influence where we start with FHIR.
So, we first think about the resources that we might need. We need the Patient resource because it will have our contact information within it. We might also want to create a Task resource and manage the workflow of our change to the Patient resource.
We can then consider what profiles or implementation guides we might need to use to fit into our particular implementation (depending upon the geography or given project). The profiles and implementation guides are going to point us to terminologies that we will need to consider, extensions that are available, and constraints that we need to work within.
Now is where I suggest we test our implementation. And when I mean test – I am suggesting that we manually create (or mock-up) a couple of resource examples to get us started. An example of a Patient resource with our contact details present and then a before and after view of the patient. This will help us consider how the resources will be modified by our application – without writing a line of “insert name of funky cool programming language here”. This step allows us to identify potential issues with our use of a resource. A great way of testing an implementation is at a HL7 Connectathon. These events bring together likeminded health interoperability people to test out the standard and find out how they are supposed to work, and what changes may be required to the standard.
We can also validate the resource against the profile that we are using to make sure it is valid. The other great part about this piece of work is that it can be re-used. We can add these examples and documentation into our implementation guide. This is the great part of an incremental approach – we can test our use of the standard and if needs modification then we can pivot very quickly.
I have 3 tips for anyone interested in healthcare interoperability.
1. Join the community – working with the standard is a team sport. Come and help us refine the standard to make it work in Australia.
2. Make a start with FHIR – no matter how small. Start incrementally. When you have an interoperability project, make HL7 FHIR your default choice.
3. Attend HL7 events – HL7 FHIR Connectathons, information sessions, training, working groups are great ways of learning and sharing your knowledge with the community. Everyone can give something to the development of the standard to make it better.
Chris Royle – Solutions Architect at Dedalus
30 years of Healthcare IT experience including healthcare integration experience in implementing solutions for customers throughout Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The last 5 years spent working with HL7 FHIR implementations in Australia and New Zealand, and current HL7 trainer for HL7 Australia.
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