c# FHIR Library
April 10, 2014 4 Comments
Ewout has started documenting the c# library available for .net developers to access FHIR resources.
This is a cool library!
I'm an independent contractor working with a number of Organizations in the health IT space. I'm an HL7 Fellow, Chair Emeritus of HL7 New Zealand and a co-chair of the FHIR Management Group. I have a keen interest in health IT, especially health interoperability with HL7 and the FHIR standard. I'm the author of a FHIR training and design tool - clinFHIR - which is sponsored by InterSystems Ltd.
This looks quite useful but I reckon the functionality is quite basic at the moment. I reckon resources have object notation, e.g. you can access items using ‘fields’ with resource.item. I think the challenge would be to provide an object model from profiles & slicing rather than working with resources individually as these would be matching to business requirements.
I’m working with a similar framework at the moment where we can create computable forms of clinical models from openEHR ‘Templates’ (=FHIR profiles) automatically using tooling. It can then be imported into a C# .NET project and used like any other assembly.
I guess one inevitable aspect to deal would be persistence, is there an intention to provide a “FHIR based clinical repository / EHR”?
Finally downloaded this and incorporated it into my Workbench Application. After populating a Combo Box with the URLs of all the listed FHIR Test Servers, I could only GET a Patient Resource from Grahame and Ewout’s servers – others resulted in exceptions for various reasons, including the use of patient rather than Patient. While I realize that these are only test servers and that the FHIR specification is clear on resource naming, it did lead me to think that without a clear certification regime for servers, problems lie ahead. Is there a plan to produce a comprehensive set of requirements for FHIR Servers and a set of test artifacts?
oops – just seen the “What’s a Conformant Server” post on Health Intersections and the links to the Home–>Implementation–>RESTful API section of the main FHIR Site. Now to see if I can get a Conformance Statement from the Test Servers.
See also the ‘sprinkler’ server test tool: https://github.com/furore-fhir/sprinkler