Vitalis Hackathon 2026 - Local Development build (v0.1.0) built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) Build Tools. See the Directory of published versions

Track: Comparing Profiles

Comparing National and EU Base Profiles

Track lead: Mikael Rinnetmaki

Overview

This track focuses on comparing national FHIR base profiles across Nordic and European countries with the emerging EU base profiles. The goal is to understand the similarities, differences, and potential alignment opportunities.

Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have all published national FHIR base profiles through their HL7 affiliates. There is an ongoing initiative to harmonize the base profiles and to create common Nordic FHIR Base profile specification. Given the similarity of the healthcare systems of all the Nordic countries, we can learn from each other in developing and using national FHIR base profiles and reach a higher level of base-profile harmonization between Nordic countries.

Also, due to the EHDS regulation, standardization efforts in Europe are now of central importance and HL7 Europe is a key organization in those efforts. With collaboration and harmonization between Nordic countries we can also in a better way contribute and influence European work, including European HL7 FHIR base profiles.

Goals

• Get clarity on what kind of differences there are between each of the Nordic base profile specifications and the EU/EHDS ones.
• Establish a vision and guidelines for harmonising Nordic base profiles with the EU/EHDS ones, where necessary.
• get the nordic-base FHIR implementation guide repo in sync with the HL7 EU one.

Prerequisites

• None

Tasks

• Let's discuss potential alternatives for checking profile compatibility.

  • The IG publisher can do some comparisons. It is not trivial to see which changes matter.

  • Repos https://github.com/hl7-eu/coalesced, https://github.com/fhir-fi/nordic-base, and multi-profile-validation show approaches for comparing profiles.

  • It could perhaps be possible to do the comparison fully programmatically. Read all profile definitions, generate sample resources that fulfil each requirement, validate against other profiles… This may be too ambitious for the hackathon?

• Let's explore how Gazelle and any other EHDS online testing tools could help.

Expected Outcomes

• Understanding of known and potential conflicts between the base profile specifications
• Some guidance on further developemnt of Nordic base profiles. Should the EU/EHDS profiles be acknowleged at all? If so, when and how?

Resources

• FHIR Base Profiles in the Nordics session in Vitalis conference programme
• The CoalescedImplementationGuide repo for comparing EU base profiles
• The nordic-base FHIR implementation guide repo
• An example multi-profile-validation repo demonstrating how profiles can be compared
• EHDS Gazelle Test Bed