FHIR-Based Real-World Healthcare Challenges Solved: Offline Meetup Report

Details

This event was held as an offline meetup at BIH@Charité in Berlin during DMEA 2026, attracting participants primarily composed of engineers and architects. The discussions were informal but highly technical, focusing on real-world implementation challenges. The core topics covered included: building and operating FHIR data pipelines at scale; migration patterns from HL7 v2 to FHIR (mapping strategies and lessons learned); and practical approaches for querying FHIR data using SQL (ViewDefinitions, tooling, and analytics). Advanced discussions also featured the use of FHIR for clinical routine documentation, leveraging SQL-on-FHIR with lineage and reproducibility, and exploring next-generation concepts like Ambient Apps. Speakers shared insights on applying FHIR for analytics and clinical intelligence, utilizing FHIR as a framework for agentic coding, maintaining IG quality via CI pipelines (e.g., R4 to R6 upgrades), and the importance of native documentation. The focus was entirely on solving concrete problems in real-world healthcare data utilization.