FHIR marketing

This page will be subject to discussion by the HL7 Marketing council as well.

Positioning

Positioning: how is this product related to other (HL7) standards? How do we explain its relationship to these other standards?

Latest product positioning statement on FHIR:

• HL7 FHIR is mainly aimed at those scenarios were data is in the cloud, e.g. at mobile health applications and the exchange of clinical and administrative data between healthcare providers.

Target audience of the FHIR product:

• Primarily: Implementers who haven't ever used HL7 anything and perhaps haven't even done healthcare previously.

LM: I don't agree with either of the above. HL7 FHIR is appropriate for everything that v3 and CDA do. In no way is it aimed at or limited to cloud scenarios (though it does enable and support them). The initial audience may be green-field, but that's certainly not the only audience. FHIR is intended to canibalize quite a bit of the existing HL7 product base. v2 is the least likely to be impacted due to the install base and inertia in that market segment, but it would be a severe mistake to suggest that FHIR lives in a space that doesn't overlap with existing products.

PR Points

PR points of FHIR:

• Ease of implementation
• Leverages established IT standards
• Leverages Web 2.0+ standards
• Optimized for Cloud-based applications
• Interoperable support for document, message, REST and SOA architectures

When asked, not part of the 'push' PR points:

• Q: "Is FHIR a replacement for X?" (with X being v2, v3 or CDA)
• A: "HL7 International strives to meet industry needs as best as possible. FHIR can be implemented in a way that meets the needs covered by X, but FHIR is in its early stages so implementations at this stage would be considered "bleeding edge". HL7's 25 years experience has shown one thing: there continue to be markets for all HL7's standards and HL7 will continue to support all its standards, including X, as the market demands"

Impact on existing product positioning

• Product: RIM
  • The mere existence of FHIR means that we need to better market the RIM as a product independent of v3-as-in-HDF, i.e. RIM is not just part of v3, it is also part of other things.
  • LM: The theory had been to market v3 as an encompassing brand of which CDA, CCOW and other things. However, that hasn't really succeeded. If we're going to have multiple products (CDA, v3, RFH, etc.) that are all based on the 'v3 infrastructure', we should probably have a way of expressing that.
    • Rene: we'd only need to express that if it is seen as important for marketing purposes. Lots of car manifacturers build diffrerent car models on top of one and the same base platform - it's in their interest that the customer is NOT aware of this, which increases the perception of "newness"/"innovation" of a car model. I'm not saying this applies in this situation, but we could end up positioning things as siblings in a product catalog (marketing view) that are seen as children by a standards creator. v3 has effectively come to mean "HDF, RIM based static model refinement". RIM is a separate product, datatypes are a separate product, CDA is a seperate product, FHIR is a seperate product. If we decide to depart from "HDF, RIM based static model refinement" (aka v3) this will only effect the v3-product, and not the other products.
• Product: Datatypes
  • FHIR introduces a new release of the datatypes specification.
    • Jean: Is this true? I wasn't sure if this is just a new implementation of the Abstract Datatypes or if this was an amalgam of existing XML types with extras from 20190.
    • LM: There are new types and changes to existing types. While there's a relationship to Abstract/ISO, it's definitely not the same.