Adam’s DevDays 2024 Experience

Jul 10, 2024 | FHIR

This is the final part of our three-part series as our Research and Develop team discusses their experiences at the DevDays 2024 Conference held in Minneapolis, MN, last weekend! Next up is Adam Keenan, Senior Business Analyst, and his takeaways from a fantastic event:

DevDays 2024 was a wonderful experience! It was a week full of learning and discussing FHIR with like-minded individuals from around the world. Being at DevDays provides an eye-opening experience and highlights the broad uses of FHIR beyond just our individual scopes. It is invigorating to see so many people gather with excitement to discuss new ways to help the health data community and find ways to innovate patient and doctor experiences.

At GigaTECH, we have been working with multiple clients on integrating data with different EHR systems. This has involved a lot of data mapping to FHIR resources. I have been creating Implementation Guides (IGs) for these clients as a way of building the roadmap to how we will do the integrations discussed and provide a repository for example FHIR artifacts. I greatly enjoyed the Implementation Guide sessions led by Lloyd Mackenzie and Gino Canessa. Both discussed the importance of seeing both the implementer and author side of writing. This will be a good perspective as I continue to write and update my IGs.

As a company, and an individual, we have been exploring and experimenting with the use of AI more and more. HL7 and the FHIR community also recognize the increased use and benefits of AI and have devoted a large amount of time at these community events to the discussion of how AI can be useful and integrated into FHIR-based solutions. I attended the Connectathon and Work Group Meetings in Phoenix, AZ, in September 2023, and that was my first introduction to AI and FHIR being paired together.  DevDays had multiple Plenary panel discussions about the use of AI, one from a patient advocacy standpoint and one from a developer standpoint. Both provided incredible insight into using AI tools for the benefit of each group! As such, we are excited to begin diving into how we can use different AI tools in our solution development.

The most fun session I attended was the Nerd Award dinner! It may seem odd to pick out dinner as my most fun session, but during this dinner, three developers gave a presentation on how they’ve included development (not just FHIR-related) in their everyday lives in the most over-the-top way possible. Not only were the solutions fun, but the storytelling by the presenters garnered much laughter. The Nerd Award was voted on and awarded, and the winner received a trophy and free entry to DevDays 2025.

DevDays 2024 was a great time, and I look forward to attending future iterations! The FHIR community is vast, and everyone is so helpful. This was our team’s first outing together at an event like this, and we felt welcomed with open arms! We will continue to engage with the community and work to provide the same level of help and support to any new adopters of FHIR we come across!

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GigaTECH Specializes In FHIR Applications

We specialize in working with FHIR and SMART on FHIR applications, creating functional, concise, and easy-to-use applications to accomplish tasks as small as triaging service tickets for customers all the way to importing bulk FHIR data from insurance databases for use by hospitals and clinicians as they seek a holistic view of integrated health information to support clinical decisions.

For a more in-depth look into how GigaTECH utilizes FHIR to address software concerns and problem-solving, check out one of our recent white papers.

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