FHIR Camp 2026: where FHIR movers and makers meet to solve interoperability problems
On November 4–6, FHIR authors, implementers, architects, and technical leaders will meet in Cascais, Portugal, for FHIR Camp 2026. Organized by Health Samurai, the three-day event will focus on the issues teams are dealing with in real FHIR projects today — from production architecture, validation, and analytics to EHDS compliance and AI agents built on FHIR. The program combines participant-led technical sessions with a full-day AI on FHIR Hackathon.
FHIR has long moved beyond the question of whether healthcare organizations need a common interoperability standard. For teams already working with it, the harder questions are practical: how FHIR fits into existing architectures, how standardized data can support analytics, how to manage terminology and validation at scale, and how healthcare AI applications can work safely with FHIR resources.
These are the questions behind this year's FHIR Camp, a small working gathering for people who build, implement, and contribute to FHIR. WaveAccess is supporting FHIR Camp 2026 as an Information Partner.
FHIR in production brings a different set of problems
Getting data into FHIR format is only part of the work. Once FHIR becomes part of a production environment, teams have to make decisions around data models, terminology, validation, implementation guides, analytics, legacy systems, and infrastructure. The answers often depend on the particular healthcare environment rather than the specification alone.
The topics proposed for FHIR Camp 2026 reflect that range of work: FHIR architecture in hospital environments, running FHIR alongside legacy systems, CI pipelines and validation, clinical data repositories, terminology and code mapping, and cross-version FHIR.
Other proposed discussions focus on how standardized healthcare data is used further downstream: SQL on FHIR, CQL, FHIRPath, FHIR-to-OMOP, data governance, analytics data modelling, and EHDS compliance are all on the list.
Taken together, the topics show how broad FHIR implementations have become. Interoperability is no longer an isolated integration task; it increasingly sits inside a wider healthcare data architecture.
AI is now part of the FHIR agenda
AI also has a prominent place in this year’s program.
Participants have proposed discussions around AI agents on FHIR, generative AI for FHIR-related utilities, AI within Structured Data Capture, and using AI to transform non-FHIR data into FHIR.
On November 6, the discussion moves into a full-day AI on FHIR Hackathon. Participants will form teams, build AI agents on top of FHIR, prototype against real FHIR resources, and present their work at the end of the day.
For teams working on healthcare AI, this is a practical intersection. An AI application still has to work with the right resources, terminology, permissions, context, and validation if it is going to operate reliably on healthcare data.
FHIR provides the common structure, and the harder work is making that structure usable inside real AI-driven workflows.
A format built around real implementation experience
FHIR Camp is deliberately small: attendance is limited to 80 people, and every application is reviewed by a FHIR architect.
The first two days combine Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, panel discussions, lightning talks, and an open mic. Participants can propose topics, bring questions from their own projects, demonstrate what they are building, and compare approaches with others working on similar problems.
The group includes people involved in both the development of FHIR and its implementation in healthcare products and systems.
Among the experts currently listed are Lloyd McKenzie of Dogwood Health Consulting; Rachel Dunscombe, Diego Kaminker, and Mohammad Jafari of HL7 International; Gino Canessa and Brian Postlethwaite of Microsoft; Sidharth Ramesh of Medblocks; Arjun Sanyal of b.well; and Nikolai Ryzhikov of Health Samurai.
What matters as much as the speaker lineup is who else will be in the room: people working directly with the standard and with the technical problems that appear when FHIR reaches production.
FHIR Camp 2026: event details
- When: November 4-6, 2026
- Where: Evolution Cascais-Estoril Hotel, Cascais, Portugal, around 30 minutes from Lisbon
- Format: Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, expert panels, lightning talks, open mic, and a Day 3 AI on FHIR Hackathon
- Attendance: 80 seats, by application
FHIR Camp is intended for architects, tech leads, CTOs and CIOs, standards specialists, and others working hands-on with FHIR across health IT, HealthTech, MedTech, healthcare providers, payers, and government organizations.
Learn more and apply: FHIR Camp 2026
