If you have ever built an ETL from a FHIR server into the CDM, you already know exactly where this guide needs your attention.
The HL7 Vulcan FHIR to OMOP Implementation Guide is in the September ballot cycle at STU (Standard for Trial Use) level. This is the version we tested at the July Connectathon, where multiple participants ran their own independent pipelines to a conformant result, independent tools converged on the same validation findings, and at least one participant used the open-source WF1 reference code to learn the transformation by building their own pipeline from it.
Now we need the wider implementer community to tell us where it still falls short.
Why this is your ballot
The friction in FHIR to OMOP work is not abstract. It shows up in the same places every time:
- Whether a given Observation belongs in MEASUREMENT or OBSERVATION, and what the guide should say when the source makes that ambiguous
- Constructing VISIT_OCCURRENCE from Encounter when the encounter model in the source does not resemble a visit
- What to do with a source code that has no standard concept, and how much of that decision the guide should specify versus leave to local convention
- Vocabulary binding: where the guide names a value set, where it should, and where it names one that does not survive contact with real source data
- Temporal precision when FHIR hands you a year and the CDM column wants a datetime
- value_as_number, value_as_concept, unit normalization, and the places where information quietly disappears in between
Every one of those is a decision somebody on this forum has made, defended in a design review, and lived with afterward. That accumulated judgment is precisely what a ballot is built to capture.
How the process works
HL7 is an ANSI-accredited standards developer, which means every comment submitted through the ballot gets a formal disposition. Negatives get reconciled on the record. This is not a suggestion box: it is a documented obligation on the working group, and it is the mechanism by which your experience changes the specification instead of becoming a workaround in your own codebase.
Dates that matter
- Ballot pool sign-up: open now, closes August 13
- Ballot comment period: opens August 14, closes September 14
Enrollment closes before voting opens. That is the deadline that catches people every cycle. If you are not in the pool by August 13, you are watching from the sidelines until the next round.
You do not need to be an HL7 member to comment. Non-members can register as commenters; members can vote.
Links
- Ballot details and sign-up: HL7 Balloting - HL7 - Confluence
- Current IG build: Introduction - FHIR to OMOP FHIR IG v2.0.0-ballot
- Jira links for comment submission are under the Support tab in the guide
Read it. Find the place where we got your use case wrong. Tell us on the record.
Happy to answer process questions in this thread.