Support for DSTU2 and STU3 in the Logica/HL7 sandbox ceased in 2023, and all support of the hosted FHIR Sandbox system ceased on December 31, 2023, except for those HL7 FHIR Accelerators with usage agreements. This does not affect hosted reference implementations (RIs) and their underlying management services infrastructure. The hosted Sandbox system will remain running through the May 2024 WGM, after which it will be shut down by Logica and HL7.
But wait! As the legacy Sandbox closes, a new, better Sandbox is emerging.
The HL7 Foundry is a big vision with supporting FHIR developers as its core mission. While the hosted Sandbox infrastructure (too costly for HL7 to maintain and operate for every FHIR developer on earth) is closing, we will be facilitating community contributions to Sandbox Community Edition: the self-hosted, fully open-source version that can run on your local machine, on your own servers, and adapted to support other FHIR backends.
Sandbox Community Edition covers the same core FHIR server bootstrapping and SMART OAuth launch processes developers care about most, is better suited as a community-driven project, and is sustainable with community support. Closing the hosted version will also allow more time to field community contributions. By default, it is backed by Smile Digital Health’s HAPI FHIR, and we’ve already seen multiple commercial models for different FHIR backends.
HL7 will host a call on Sandbox Community Edition in February, 2024.
To join, please email Preston Lee [preston.lee@prestonlee.com] and Diego Kaminker [diego@hl7.org].
But that’s not all!
Publication of implementation guide (IG) reference implementations (RIs) has always been anticlimactic. We post a hosted copy, it gets presented periodically by the developer, and there is no discovery method or overall curation to further leverage the RI.
What we’d like to see is the massive community of FHIR developers outside HL7 more easily adopt your thoughtful IGs with the help of more turnkey local copies of the RI software. It’s also a common complaint of external developers that running RIs locally can be frustrating due to hardcoded configuration, missing seed data, etc.
Early this year, we’ll start piloting a developer-centric, structured mechanism of Foundry to publish RIs for the IG audience outside HL7.
Stay tuned!