1. Vonk FHIR Engine
Christiaan Knaap
27 September 2018

2. Who are we? 100% FHIR® Since 2011 Reference .NET FHIR library
Simplifier.net
Forge Profile editor
Vonk FHIR Engine
FHIR DevDays
Christiaan Knaap
20 yr IT dev / analyst / architect
Lead dev of Vonk FHIR Engine
Zulip

3. Vonk FHIR Engine Web Service that implements the FHIR RESTful API
Exchange healthcare data like Booking.com exchanges reservations
Storage and Search of FHIR Resources
Gather external and internal data in one unified FHIR model
Profile aware
Tune it to your health realm
Extensible and adaptable
Plug in your own business rules and adapters
Vonk FHIR Engine together with its own storage is an implementation of what the specification calls a ‘FHIR Server’.
And it is not just an implementation, but the reference implementation in Microsoft .NET.

4. Solutions Clinical Data Repository Facade App backend
Integrated set, leveraging the FHIR® datamodel
Facade
Bolt the FHIR RESTful API onto your legacy systems
App backend
One model, one API for all your mobile and web apps; just FHIR®
Each of these are treated in the subsequent slides.

5. Clinical Data Repository
Central collection of health data from multiple sources
Open and standardized
With support for local FHIR profiles
Fit for multiple purposes:
Research
Quality Measures and Reporting
Analytics and AI
Third party apps
EHR has a lot of the data but cannot combine it with data from other systems
A typical hospital has 50 – 100 different systems, from which data is gathered for
research
delivery of data sets to institutions BI
Electronic Data Capture
etc
Often you get subsets for each goal, each inventing their own datamodel,
prohibiting reuse of data and modelling.
If you decide to model everything in FHIR,
Vonk enables you to store everything together, using the FHIR RESTful API, including versioning and search.
About the image:
Vonk FHIR Engine manages its single large datastore.
Source systems can send their data to Vonk as FHIR resources.
Or they can expose it as FHIR (using Vonk FHIR Facade), so the CDR can periodically pull new data out.
Vonk
EHR
Diabetes
etc...

6. Facade Valuable data in silos Data in legacy systems is locked in
Extracted ad-hoc
HL7v2 if you’re lucky
Think of the major systems in your institution.
But certainly also all the departmental and home-grown solutions that were not developed to be open.

7. Vonk FHIR Facade Put the FHIR API on your legacy system
Real time data access
With no changes to the legacy system
Provide a mapping to / from FHIR
Goodies come for free Authorization Subscription Validation / Data Quality Complex searches
An example on how to build a mapping is provided in the documentation:

8. App backend If you’re an app developer The Health web service App
You want to focus on this
But you have to do this
The
Health
App
You have to provide a back end with
api
storage
datamodel
authorization
And not even mentioned:
deployment (on premise, cloud, multiple OS’s, ...)
database maintenance
The
Health
App
web service
storage

9. Vonk as your App backend
Datamodel based on FHIR® Use a subset and profiles to fit your app
Generic storage for any resource Fully searchable
Vonk is your web service FHIR RESTful API + plugins where needed
Authorization included SMART on FHIR out of the box, other methods can be plugged in
Vonk FHIR Engine can provide much of these mundane aspects of your app. Leaving you more time to focus on the apps added value.
SMART on FHIR: Authorization based on the SMART tokens is included. Authentication and assigning the tokens to users is expected to be part of the identity solutions of your organization:
You already know your users, no need to re-enter them into Vonk.

10. Cross solution benefits
Ease of deployment X-platform, Dockerized, Kubernetes, Cloud ready
Fits your database needs big and small SQL Server, MongoDB, CosmosDB, SQLite
Robust and scalable
Customizable Custom profiles, search parameters and plugins
Vonk can be deployed in minutes.
Supported OS’s are Linux, OSX and Windows, as supported by the Microsoft .NET Core framework.
An example of providing a plugin is in the documentation:

11. Next steps Try it yourself on vonk.fire.ly
Download as a turn-key server from simplifier.net/downloads
Useful profiles on Simplifier? Try the yellow button!
Want to develop? Get started on a facade: or a plugin:
When you register on (for free) you can get a fully functional trial license, with no obligations
Yellow button is a link off of a Simplifier project. It provides you with Vonk running in a Docker container, having all the projects profiles pre-loaded.

12. Contact us Right here, Rien Wertheim or me
Later on at the WGM in Baltimore
Any time at
Or best of all...

13.
Amsterdam 14 – 16 November 2018