The Re-envisioned Logica/HL7 FHIR Sandbox for 2024

[prest...@prestonlee.com]

[The below announcements are rolling out to various HL7 and Logica systems.. please share!]

Support for DSTU2 and STU3 in the Logica/HL7 sandbox ceased in 2023, and all support of the hosted FHIR Sandbox system ceased on December 31, 2023, except for those HL7 FHIR Accelerators with usage agreements. This does not affect hosted reference implementations (RIs) and their underlying management services infrastructure. The hosted Sandbox system will remain running through the May 2024 WGM, after which it will be shut down by Logica and HL7.

But wait! As the legacy Sandbox closes, a new, better Sandbox is emerging.

The HL7 Foundry is a big vision with supporting FHIR developers as its core mission. While the hosted Sandbox infrastructure (too costly for HL7 to maintain and operate for every FHIR developer on earth) is closing, we will be facilitating community contributions to Sandbox Community Edition: the self-hosted, fully open-source version that can run on your local machine, on your own servers, and adapted to support other FHIR backends.

Sandbox Community Edition covers the same core FHIR server bootstrapping and SMART OAuth launch processes developers care about most, is better suited as a community-driven project, and is sustainable with community support. Closing the hosted version will also allow more time to field community contributions. By default, it is backed by Smile Digital Health’s HAPI FHIR, and we’ve already seen multiple commercial models for different FHIR backends.

HL7 will host a call on Sandbox Community Edition in February, 2024.

To join, please email Preston Lee [prest...@prestonlee.com] and Diego Kaminker [di...@hl7.org].

But that’s not all!

Publication of implementation guide (IG) reference implementations (RIs) has always been anticlimactic. We post a hosted copy, it gets presented periodically by the developer, and there is no discovery method or overall curation to further leverage the RI.

What we’d like to see is the massive community of FHIR developers outside HL7 more easily adopt your thoughtful IGs with the help of more turnkey local copies of the RI software. It’s also a common complaint of external developers that running RIs locally can be frustrating due to hardcoded configuration, missing seed data, etc.

Early this year, we’ll start piloting a developer-centric, structured mechanism of Foundry to publish RIs for the IG audience outside HL7.

Stay tuned!

[prest...@prestonlee.com]

Following up from the call..  I’ve found the following "missing" repositories and moved them over to GitHub, created corresponding Docker Hub repos, and built and pushed new cross-platform images… though I have not tested them. Contributors will have to fix any issues.

Bilirubin App
https://github.com/logicahealth/sandbox-bilirubin-risk-chart
https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/hspconsortium/sandbox-bilirubin-risk-chart/tags?page=1&ordering=last_updated


Patient Data Manager
https://github.com/logicahealth/sandbox-patient-data-manager
https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/hspconsortium/patient-data-manager/tags?page=1&ordering=last_updated

[Rob Dingwell]

Preston,  is there any documentation on the overall architecture, role of each of the services and how they all fit together?  I think this would be useful for people who do not want to deal with docker or those that want to update/enhance/fix certain components.  Also, making things available via docker means that community contributions need to be tracked and new images built and tested to ensure the community edition still works as it should before pushing updates to it.  That also means there needs to be some guardians for the repos as well.  Has any of that been thought of?  Is HL7 still going to manage the repos and gate access to commits or is there an expectation that someone else will take that on? 

[Sean Mahoney]

It seems like public endpoints on Logica now require full authentication. Can that be corrected ASAP as we have demo's planned tomorrow that require public access

[Sean Mahoney]

Nevermind. It seems that toggling the "allow open FHIR endpoint" sets it back to open.

[Eric Weiser]

Hi Preston,

Is there a precise date at which the Hosted Logica will be shut down? (What does WGM stand for?)

Thanks,

Eric

[prest...@prestonlee.com]

Hi Eric,

WGM = HL7 Working Group Meeting. https://www.hl7.org/events/workgroupmeetings.cfm

A precise shutdown date hasn't been set, but I'm hoping to follow shortly after the May HL7 meetings in Dallas ending May 24th.

Preston

[prest...@prestonlee.com]

The issue of open endpoints spontaneously requiring authentication is a know bug, yeah. Toggling the setting back and forth as you suggested is the easy fix.

Preston 

[prest...@prestonlee.com]

Hi Rob,

There may be some documentation Logica's Confluence site, but it would be super dated and pre-date the Community Edition concept that does not rely on native AWS services. Getting things fully cloud agnostic was a whole project to start with.

All the good points you mentioned have indeed been thought of... unfortunately there is no funding :) Currently I and a few others have admin of the GitHub repos, and are VERY open to turning product leadership over to community committers. There are many people interested in continuing to track and use the project, but no one has stepped up to take the reigns of the development lead role thus far. In other words, others in the community will need to take this on. Please let me know if you're interested!

Preston

[Tuomas Järvensivu]

Hi!

I'm working on a health care application where integration to a FHIR and SMART-on-FHIR compliant EHR is essential. While I have a long history in software engineering, I don't have experience in creating EHR - integrated health care applications in the past.

We already have an MVP of our product and we would like to demonstrate the current solution to healthcare providers (potential future partners for a pilot project). Issue with similar solutions in the past has been that the integration to EHRs has been poor and according to our observations and interviews this has led into a situation where health care personnel have had to resort to slow workflows with manual steps copying data from one place to another. In order to show an improvement to existing solutions we would like to demonstrate an end-to-end user flow of a clinician. Within the demo workflow our solution would be integrated with the EHR. The workflow would be initiated from the EHR user interface. EHR would launch our solution (using SMART-on-FHIR). Our solution would then be used to conduct the patient test and write results to EHR using FHIR APIs. Last the user would return to EHR user interface and observe the results of the test there.

Based on the information I have, there are no publicly available sandboxes provided by EHR providers (like Epic) that would also include an EHR simulator (which I hope is a user interface that mimics a FHIR - compliant EHR). I was excited when I learned about Logica FHIR Sandbox and that it ships with EHR simulator.

After learning that the hosted sandbox infrastructure (https://sandbox.logicahealth.org/) is being discontinued (or at least its open only to HSPC members) I cloned the Sandbox Community Edition from GitHub (https://github.com/logicahealth/sandbox-community-edition).

After spending some hours with sandbox community edition, I have some questions I have not (yet) been able to find answers to on my own and would greatly appreciate if someone would be able to shed some light on these:

• Is the Sandbox Community Edition a tool to achieve our need (ability to develop a health care application and demonstrate it to a healthcare provider with simulated end-to-end clinician workflow within mock EHR user interface)?
• What is the currently maintained sandbox community edition source code repository?
  • https://github.com/logicahealth/sandbox-community-edition is the one I gravitated to, but I have learned that there are also some code base repositories hosted in Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/hspconsortium/workspace/repositories/
    
  • Sandbox community edition refers external projects through Docker images such as `logicahealth/sandbox`. I haven't located the source code repositories for these projects. Are these also open sourced, and if yes, what is the repository in which they are maintained?
• How is the work currently organized? Sandbox Community Edition has been a project by Logica but Preston mentions there the involvement of HL7 Foundry. Which organization should I follow in order to stay up to date with the development of the Sandbox Community Edition and where can I join the correct community? What is the role of HSPC?

If I have understood the purpose of Sandbox Community Edition correctly, it truly seems like a valuable tool for FHIR application developers!

Best Regards,
Tuomas Järvensivu

[prest...@prestonlee.com]

Hi Tuomas,

The Community Edition currently has an issue with Keycloak that several community members are trying to fix at the moment at the GitHub repo you mentioned. All the old Bitbucket repositories shouldn't be needed anymore, but it is certainly possible we missed one when migrating to GitHub. For security reasons the old Bitbucket repositories were maintained privately.

The best place for Foundry discussion is the #Foundry channel in FHIR Community Zulip: https://chat.fhir.org  

I'm attempting to arrange for an official migration processes that will work for most users, though not quite ready for that announcement. :)

Preston

[Tuomas Järvensivu]

Thanks Preston, this is valuable information!

As mentioned in the GitHub repo the Keycloak issue is now resolved (although one might want to adjust the implementation later).

Tuomas