The OpenHIE Connectathon is a merger of two exciting types of meetings. This is a technical space for software teams and architects to engage and get their “hands-in” or “on” OpenHIE itself and see it materialised. Combining the principles of a connectathon and a hackathon we are excited to provide a space for teams to connect their existing tools to OpenHIE workflows and use-cases as well as give the community an opportunity to propose low hanging fruit use cases for the groups to work on. Recognising that many attendees may be new to OpenHIE there is no better way than actively engaging in designing, developing, configuring, implementing and connecting to an OpenHIE architecture to learn the fundamentals and build the relationships that you will need going forward.

Objectives

The attendees of the connect-a-thon are aiming to:

• Connect existing tools to OpenHIE foundational registries

• Learn how to implement workflows within their tools

• Jointly work together to implement common use-cases within an OpenHIE architecture

• Self-organise into learning sessions and create breakaway groups to discuss topics / show ideas

Great so what does this really mean/look like?

Well we are looking forward to the attendees (that is you, the participant) bringing their technical strengths to the table and bringing their systems to engage with others in the field. These sessions are focused at providing the space for the architects, the analysts, the developers and the integrators within the communities to meet and discuss how to solve active problems as well as start on the fundamentals of connecting systems. We are expecting a combination of the following to emerge:

• Focused technical discussions around how best to engage with the deeper aspects of data exchange on a fundamental standards level and workflows.
• Generating sequence diagrams and talking about what data systems curate and what would be available in the other systems and documented models and technical specifications to get it there.
• Bringing your technical questions and started projects/code to any persons representing tools and technologies and engaging with them and others on how best to architect and develop the solution
• Bring your code and application and your development skills to the table and try to connect to systems that are present and possibly consume an OpenHIE workflow and share data with other system
• Learn more about the technical nature and how to model things in FHIR and or how others have done it
• Design decisions that impact scale and speed as wells as how different implementers select different development patterns and architectures to solve their challenges.
• And other discussions that flow.

So what will be available to connect to and test against?

This space is a technical space and we encourage participants to "put their hands up" as to what they will be brining and what they will be making available to the participants to engage with. Depending on the number of participants we are considering scheduling a lightning session where groups can rapidly (5min/5 slides) present their tools as an intro. Currently the following teams and tools have put their hands up to be at the event and have technologies available.

The schedule

The connect-a-thon schedule follows a looser flow than a formal agenda with the introduction sessions being sharp and pointed to get the teams aligned to the technical tasks at hand. For the duration of the event all 3 rooms will be open and available for teams to engage in and create breakaway sessions of informal discussions and learnings. Leveraging the unconferencing style the attendees will propose and create their own agendas and topics and “vote with their feet” as to what is of interest.

Expected outputs

Members will be familiar with the OpenHIE communities, architecture, patterns and persons involved. We would have made significant contributions to a real world use case that was proposed in the main event or pre-event polling. We have systems that are able to leverage OpenHIE workflows and connections.