Extending the FHIR standard to handle provenance

I wrote a paper for W3C PROV program with Arnon and Adriane from Mitre. The paper discusses the experience so far with applying the W3C PROV model to the HL7 FHIR model. Much of the material and inspiration came from my blog post in March on "Provenance vs Audit - its not a competition". The paper is much better, and all of that better-ness is because of my co-authors.

The paper is published on Provenance Week 2016 - program agenda "PROV: Three Years Later". I was not present to present. Search for "FHIR".

You will also notice that Reed Gelzer has a paper published there as well.

The main point we make in our paper is to introduce the PROV community to the FHIR community, and thus enable the PROV community to better understand how other standards communities are using their standard, and thus the struggles they have with understanding and applying it to the Healthcare domain.  In fact pointing out that because of historic reasons healthcare has separated Audit from Provenance, and this might not please a provenance purist.

Abstract: 

In this work, we look at the problems a domain-specific standard committee faces when trying to “involve” provenance to meet domain requirements, without committing to the major expansion of adding a general provenance capability. We also begin the discussion of what the provenance community can do to assist the domain-specific creation committee with the easy inclusion and usage of well-specified, and provenance-community approved guidance.

That is not to say that the goal is to force all PROV use to be pure, but rather to help the PROV community understand how they need to be guiding force, not breaking force.