It's January again, which of course means it's time for the January HL7 Working Group Meeting. As always, the first two days of the HL7 meeting brings FHIR Connectathon, and this was Connectathon 14.

I feel like every time I visit one of these meetings, the scale of the meeting astounds me and I can't imagine it being any bigger... and then that happens again the next time. The final tally at the September 2016 (Baltimore) Connectathon was 170 people. The final tally here in San Antonio was 209 so we continue to beat expectations.

I think we are finally passing a point where it's feasible to fit everyone in a half-size hotel ballroom. We may well have some hard decisions about whether the format still works or whether we need to turn people away in September.

Also amazing to me was the number of new faces. On the first day, Ewout Kramer asked the room for anyone who was a first-time attendee to a FHIR Connectathon to raise their hand. It looked like about half the room raised their hand so we're really expanding the pool of interested people right now. Exciting days for FHIR!

Monday night brought our usual HAPI & .NET Users Group. We discussed a proposal we're working on for a template-based approach to automatic resource narrative generation. There will be more on that in a future post.