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DevDays 2023 Program update

Rien Wertheim

Just last week, we published our program for HL7® FHIR® DevDays 2023. Here’s a quick summary:

  • Dates are 6 to 9 June, online and in Amsterdam
  • We had 220 submissions to our call for presentations (a record!) of which 130 have been approved*
  • Sessions will include Tutorials, Community Talks (about real-life projects), keynotes, birds-of-a-feather sessions on experimental topics, and Let’s Build! sessions
  • All keynotes, tutorials, and Community Talks will be streamed for online participants and recorded
  • Other sessions are for on-site attendees only
  • Registration is now open – early bird discounts end at midnight CET on 12 May 2023

Our “Billboard Hot 100”

The keywords we assign to submissions provide a handy overview of what’s happening in the FHIR space. Here are the top ten – you’ll find a lot of presentations covering these topics:

  1. Mapping
  2. Implementation Guide
  3. CQL
  4. SMART on FHIR
  5. Profiling
  6. Quality Measures
  7. Structured Data Capture (SDC)
  8. International Patient Summary (IPS) & International Patient Access (IPA)
  9. Clinical Decision Support / CDS Hooks
  10. Terminology

We’re surprised as you are by that third place for Clinical Query Language (CQL). It’s been around for a long time, and it’s always been on the program at DevDays, but right now it seems to be picking up steam. The same goes for the related topic of Quality Measures. IPS and IPA were niche topics for a long time, but we’re happy to see that both are now gaining traction. The FHIR community doesn’t care about deglobalization. 😊

Compliance is king

Regulation and government grants are driving the adoption of FHIR, as national authorities become convinced that standards in general and FHIR in particular can ease some of the societal and fiscal pressure on healthcare systems. A substantial number of talks are directly or indirectly related to regulation in a specific country, including the US Cures Act and CMS Interoperability Rule, ISiK in Germany, and MedMij/VIPP in the Netherlands.

We’ve created a “Compliance Track” with 20-minute presentations to give an overview of what’s happening around the world. We’re also running a survey across jurisdictions to gain more insight, and the results will be presented at DevDays.

Special tracks and special speakers

Among the special tracks this year we have the Student Track (back from a little hiatus with seven teams already signed up); the Compliance Track (see above); and the DACH track for Germany (D), Austria (A), and Switzerland (CH). And for the first time: Women on FHIR, including a WoF reception, a plenary panel, and one-on-one meetings to share perspectives. Interoperability (or world peace) without women? Fuhgeddaboudit. One of our special speakers is Dawn Dowding from the University of Manchester, a professor in nursing informatics. We already incorporated the voice of the patient (go Dave deBronkart!) and the doctors. Now it’s time for the nurses, who are after all the largest workforce and IT users in healthcare.

Quantity and quality

The first edition of DevDays was in 2014, and in the early days the call for presentations would result in submissions with a wide variety of FHIR maturity. That’s different now. FHIR has been adopted by the industry for many use cases in many countries, and there’s a huge reservoir of expertise in the community. This hasn’t made things any easier for the jury as quality and quantity increase but space and time slots remain the same. Four full days with five to six parallel tracks make for a daunting program for us and for the attendees!

*Apologies to everyone whose submissions we had to decline. We had to reject some great talks where the topic duplicated another presentation or was too specific to attract a big audience.

Fun stuff

Fun stuff, you bet. This is DevDays after all. We’ll have sports (the DevDays run and pickleball), music, yoga, satire, and a social night out (we’re keeping the details a secret for now). And an experiment: the Nerds Track, where all in-person attendees can compete for the coveted Ubernerd Award – more about this later.

To top it off, the city of Amsterdam will put it its usual star performance. But online attendees haven’t been forgotten either: online fun ­will be coming soon, to an event app near you.

In person or on screen – we’re looking forward to seeing you in June!

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