Saying ‘No’ with FHIR: The List resource

Was cruising the Stack Overflow site looking at FHIR questions (as you do) and I came across this question about how to indicate that a person has no known allergies. It was answered by Lloyd who stated that you should use the List resource to do so.

This is such a common requirement in healthcare that I thought it was worth a short post on.

And, to be explicit I’m referring to requirements like being able to state:

• No known allergies
• No usual medications
• No problems known

And not the issue of ‘incomplete’ data that the ‘nullFlavor’ attribute of v3 was supposed to address. This is a complex – and controversial – topic that Grahame has addressed in this post. FHIR has taken the perspective that the complexities of  nullFlavor outweights its value ‘for the 80%’. When it is important, then a resource can either define a specific property (e.g. ‘Date of Birth not known’) or an extension could be used.

Now we’ve already talked about the use of a List when representing a list of Medications where we discussed the advantages that a List gives over a simple query of resources, but we didn’t talk specifically about its value when wanting to explicitly state that the person was not on any regular medications.

The List property that you use is called ‘emptyReason’, and it’s a CodeableConcept which has the following possible values:

• nilknown
• notasked
• withheld
• notstarted
• closed

(refer to the spec for a description of what these mean, though it’s pretty obvious… Incidentally, the type of this property is incomplete – which means that there is a set of values that most people agree is correct, but it is permissible to use other codes if needed).

You can only use the emptyReason if the list itself is empty (which makes sense).

The List has particular value in a Document as many of the sections will actually be lists of things (like lab tests, family medications, interventions etc), so it’s very helpful to be able to indicate ‘no known <resource>’. For other resources that don’t use Lists – like the Family History or relevant past history – then you’d need to use an extension. For example, you might want to add an extension to a document section that points to the same binding as the emptyReason so you could state, for example, no known family history.