The AEGIS FHIR Team continues to make enhancements to the Touchstone Project and its Test-Driven-Development (TDD) integrated ecosystem. The Touchstone Project is an AEGIS Developers Integration Lab (DIL) initiative – a next generation Open Access / Cloud-based Testing Platform which applies Conformance and Interoperability testing capabilities against the HL7® FHIR® specification. Touchstone has been engineered from the ground up to leverage the new FHIR® TestScript resource. At the May 2016 HL7® FHIR® Connectathon – AEGIS will showcase advancements in our recently deployed Touchstone v2.3.0 with multi-version FHIR support: DSTU 2.0, DSTU 2.1 (Connectathon 11 snapshot) and STU 3 Candidate (Connectathon 12 snapshot). Another enhancement industry and developers will like is the updated FHIR server conformance statement rendering. Additional modernizations to the platform include:
- Rules Engine
- Complex rules against message headers and body (that go beyond what TestScript assert previously supported) can now be evaluated using the new Rules Engine.
- Rules can be implemented in Groovy, Schematron, and XSLT. Support for additional languages will be added in the future.
- Test Script and Fixture Versioning.
- Changes to Test Script and Fixture sources are preserved as separate versions. Users are informed of new Test Script and Fixture versions on Test Execution screens.
- Capture Test System conformance statement for each test execution.
- Users can now see the conformance statement of each test system involved in test execution at the time of execution on Test Execution screens.
- Improvements in conformance checks and display of conformance statements.
- Validations are now performed for multiple FHIR specification versions.
In addition to the FHIR® Connectathon – the HL7® Working Group Meetings are held simultaneously with this event. These WGMs serve two important purposes:
- They give the HL7 International work groups a chance to meet face-to-face to work on the standards as well as the opportunity to network with industry leaders from around the world.
- They provide an invaluable educational resource for the healthcare IT community.
Some of the key themes for the May 2016 meeting include:
- High visibility on the concept and need for interoperability.
- The desire to implement applications that work—-supporting the need to test during all phases of standards development so that actual implementations might work smoothly.
- Assistance with development—provide or define the tooling or tool-kits needed in implementation so those working with the HL7 products don’t have to sort this out.
- Socialize the work that is occurring—so there might be the opportunity to not re-invent the wheel.
- Interest to ensure that the FHIR work is being done globally because so many organizations are international in their work.
Mario Hyland (@interopguy) from AEGIS will participate the Architecture Review Board (ARB) meeting. And by the wy, AEGIS is a sponsor of this year’s conference! If you are there in Montreal next week, please look for me or Mario and let us share what Touchstone is all about.