FHIR Messages
May 14, 2015 2 Comments
Rene Spronk recorded this video on the v2/FHIR messaging at the recent FHIR connectathon.
enjoy!
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.
Hi,
I recently looking at FHIR DSTU2 to create messages to be sent to my App. It seems to be a bit flexible to construct the messages and I am not able to find good reference to finalize my messages schema.
I wish to send a set of Medication Prescriptions for a patient to my App. It looks like I have a couple of Options:
1. Construct Message as a Bundle with multiple Resources (1 Patient, multiple MedPrescriptions (with Medication Reference with “Contained”)).
2. Construct Message as a Bundle with multiple Resources (Multiple MedPrescriptions (with Patient & Medication References with “Contained”)).
I am struggling with finding the standard way of sending messages across system. Is there an industry standard in how to construct the messages for my use case?
Thanks.
Well, we call FHIR a ‘platform’ spec, in part as there are often different ways to do the same thing – and not every application works in the same way! However, there are ‘rules’ around how a message is constructed which any FHIR compliant app should understand (at least those purporting to understand messages). In the example you gave you had a number of contained resources – which was actually the topic of my very first post! (http://fhirblog.com/2013/10/10/fhir-contained-resources/ ) In general, the advice is to avoid contained resources unless they simply cannot be identified – and you’d probably know who the patient was, and want to track prescriptions separately as well. And you’ll be please to know that in DSTU-2 a medicationPrescription now has the option of a codeableConcept for the medication instead of a full resource – which may help.