Top 3 Fhir Interview Questions
Browse 3 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Fhir. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.
What is FHIR, and when would you still be dealing with HL7 v2?
FHIR is a resource-oriented REST API with a defined set of resources, constrained for real use by profiles and implementation guides. HL7 v2 is the older pipe-delimited messaging standard that still carries most of the event traffic inside hospitals, so the two coexist and an integration engine translates between them.
How would you model sex and gender in a patient record?
Not as one field. Administrative sex, recorded sex at birth, gender identity, name and pronouns to use, and the sex parameter a clinical calculation needs are separate elements with separate provenance and separate consumers, and each has to be able to change without rewriting the others.
You are connecting a fifth hospital to the same interface and every one of the first four needed bespoke work. Why does that keep happening?
Because a standard constrains structure and leaves the meaning local. Optionality, local identifiers and code lists, custom extensions and different workflow triggers mean conformance to the standard is not compatibility - which is why the fix is your own profile plus a test suite, not more mapping.