Renaming the FHIR Conformance resource

 

Just a short note to let people know of a significant change that has occurred in FHIR since the Baltimore Working Group meeting in September.

Perhaps surprisingly, there’s only one actual requirement of a RESTful FHIR server – that it hosts a resource that describes what its capabilities are. It returns this resource when you call the metadata endpoint of the server like this:

http://fhir3.healthintersections.com.au/open/metadata

Previously called the conformance resource, it describes the version of FHIR that it supports, the RESTful endpoints, profiles, messaging endpoints and a host of other stuff.

However, the word ‘conformance’ has come to mean a lot more as FHIR has evolved, so its name has been changed to ‘CapabilityStatement’ to reflect that.

It has the same structure (or pretty much so I think) and serves the same purpose – it’s just a rename.

Currently only Grahames server has this change (so the link above will return it) but you can expect the other STU-3 servers to support this soon.

You have been warned!