Workshop Recommendations

National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of the Director (OD), Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS)

July 2023


FHIR® is the registered trademark of Health Level Seven International (HL7). Use of the FHIR trademark does not constitute an HL7 endorsement of this workshop.

Overview

Intended audience:

  • Instructors involved with the design and implementation of FHIR for research-related training.

Learning objectives:

  1. Identify existing FHIR for research capacity-building resources

  2. Understand the process for re-using existing resources for future capacity-building activities

  3. Apply recommendations and best practices from past NIH workshops to future workshops

Topics

  1. Existing capacity-building resources
  2. Working with the FHIR for Research documentation website
  3. Recommendations for live workshops
    • Compute environment
    • Synthetic data
    • Other recommendations

Existing Resources

  1. FHIR for Research documentation website

  2. Webinars

  3. Hands-on workshops

Note: purl.org is a service provided by the Internet Archive for persistent URLs that can be updated if the actual URL changes. This is helpful to avoid dead links in webinar videos.

Documentation Website

Documentation Website /
Overview

Documentation Website /
Structure

  • Written documentation is broken up into self-contained “modules”

  • Modules are organized into sections:

    1. Overview
      1. FHIR for Research
      2. SMART on FHIR
      3. Data Modeling in FHIR
    2. Working with FHIR Data
      1. Tabular Analysis
      2. REDCap
      3. FHIR Bulk Data
    3. Advanced Topics
      1. Synthetic Data & FHIR Testing Servers
      2. Other Topics

Documentation Website /
Live Walk-Through

Documentation Website /
Setup

  1. Install dependencies (R, Python, RStudio, Quarto)
  2. Clone https://purl.org/fhir-for-research/github
  3. Open as a project in RStudio (or another editor)

Detailed setup instructions are found at https://purl.org/fhir-for-research/web/setup

Documentation Website /
Editing

Documentation Website /
Contributing

Workshop Best Practices

Workshop Best Practices /
Introduction

  • Workshops are a useful approach to help attendees quickly climb the learning curve for a technical topic

    • Include a combination of lecture and hands-on participation

    • Pair with written documentation that participants can refer to later

Workshop Best Practices /
Workshop Design

Workshop Best Practices /
Structure

  • Provide an “on ramp” introducing the topic at the beginning so less technical participants can still get value from the beginning

    • In general, order content from least to most technical

    • Consider a mini-webinar introduction

    • Verbally identify the “drop points” where people who are not interested in the technical content can safely leave

  • Provide a walk-through to introduce hands-on participation

    • Provide sample code/template that participants can run themselves

    • Consider having the presenter fill in the sample code/template live, or give participants time to work themselves and ask questions

  • Keep the total length under 3 hours

    • Consider 1-2 hours of content, and an optional “lab” hour if there is substantial hands-on content to allow participants to work independently and ask questions
    • Include 5 minute breaks every hour

Workshop Best Practices /
Running a Workshop

  • Plan for “preflight” if technical setup is necessary

    • Strategize to reduce setup as much as possible (e.g., use cloud Jupyter environment rather than requiring participants to run it locally – more on this below)

  • Include at least one TA to help with technical issues and questions during the workshop

    • For virtual workshops, use breakout rooms if participants need 1:1 help

Workshop Best Practices /
Promotion & Registration

  • Require registration to attend

    • Allows for monitoring and adjustment of outreach strategy if the desired mix of people don’t initially sign up

  • Start registration at least 2 weeks ahead of the event

  • Include learning objectives and prerequisites in registration promotional materials

    • Consider the Introduction to FHIR for Reserach webinar as a prerequisite if your potential audience doesn’t have prior FHIR experience (https://purl.org/fhir-for-research/webinars/intro)

    • Identify any technical skills are required for some/all of the workshop

Workshop Best Practices /
Recording & Accessibility

  • Use Zoom local recording (or similar) to record screen and audio

  • Share recording with subtitles for accessibility

    • Modern transcription applications like MacWhisper can generate subtitles that are quite accurate, requiring fairly minimal manual editing
    • Subtitles can be in a .srt “sidecar” file – this is a plain text file that can be easily edited by hand

  • Provide slides and other materials on a single webpage at the time of the event

  • Use URLs in slides that can be updated later if the destination URL changes (e.g. from https://purl.org) to avoid broken links in video recordings

Environment & Data

Environment & Data /
Compute

Environment & Data /
Running a Server

  • Typically memory is the main constraint, which scales linearly with the number of simultaneous users

    • Our FHIR Bulk Data workshop using JupyterHub (via TLJH) required around 600MB/user minimum

    • Run your code ahead of time to estimate memory needs

  • CPU usage will likely be low unless your workshop includes a lot of CPU-constrained code (e.g., training machine learning models)

  • TLJH: https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/howto/admin/resource-estimation.html

  • NIH-funded researchers may take advantage of the STRIDES Initiative for cloud computing. For more information, visit https://datascience.nih.gov/strides

Environment & Data /
Synthetic Data

Environment & Data /
FHIR Test Server

Wrap-up

Wrap-up

© 2023 The MITRE Corporation / Approved for Public Release / Case #23-0966