What do you do when you can’t (easily) create a valid resource ID?

July 30, 2015 2 Comments

This post is rather like ‘peeking over the parapet’ – but here goes!

As most of you will know, one of the fundamental concepts behind FHIR is that resources have an ‘identity’ by which it can be addressed – expressed in the specification as the ‘id’ of the resource. And that id is limited to 64 characters in length.

Once you have this identity, it is then possible for individual resources to reference each other in a ‘web’ of information – for example a Condition resource can reference the Patient resource that represents the person who has the condition.

Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized

Using clinFHIR to create a profile

July 26, 2015 12 Comments

In the previous post, we outlined our plans for creating a profile against the Patient resource, and manually created and saved some of the supporting resources (ValueSet and our NamingSystem) that we’re going to need.

Next up is the extension definition and the actual profile against Patient. Once we’ve done that (which is the topic of this post) we can actually create conformant resources.

Fortunately, we can use clinFHIR to create these artifacts, so start up that application and select the ‘profile builder’ from the front page. (And a reminder that this is very much ‘beta’ software designed for training! Let me know of any issues)

Read more of this post

Filed under Clinical Tagged with ,

Creating and using FHIR profiles

July 26, 2015 5 Comments

One of the things we discussed at the recent seminar in New Zealand was profiling FHIR resources. This is where we take the base resources and then adapt them for specific use cases. While quite simple in concept, there are some complexities ‘under the hood’, so part of the talk was to describe some of the ‘infrastructure’ that makes all this work.

Once we had the set up some of the supporting resources, we used the clinFHIR tool to actually assemble the profile, as this makes it easier for ‘non-technical’ people – especially clinicians – to build these artifacts, and then build a resource that is conformant to that profile.

Read more of this post

Filed under Clinical Tagged with ,

FHIR Seminar in New Zealand

July 24, 2015 4 Comments

We held a seminar today on FHIR and SNOMED. This is the FHIR part. We talked about FHIR in general, profiling and how we could use FHIR in New Zealand. In particular we spend a bit of time using the clinFhir tool both to create a sample profile and to generate a conformant resource from that profile.

Will post on the details of that later…

Filed under Uncategorized

Finding Patients seen by clinicians

July 11, 2015 1 Comment

So I got an interesting email yesterday.

Someone asked me how to fulfill the following User Story: As a clinician, I want to search for a list of patients being seen by certain consultants today.

There were some Acceptance Criteria given:

  • I can enter the name of one or more consultants to search against, combining this with any clinics, wards and specialties that have been specified in the search criteria
  • I can amend a search by removing an item from the search criteria
  • In the list of results, I can see the following properties for each patient:
  • Hospital Number
  • NHS Number
  • Full name (surname, first name)
  • DOB
  • Sex
  • Consultant
  • Location (ward or clinic name)
  • Date (admission/appointment date)

Now, we’d want to dig a bit into the specifics of how some of the searches should work – eg what does it mean when you specify a consultant and a ward – that the consultant saw the patient on the specified ward on that date? And what happens when both a consultant and a specialty are in the query parameters?

But lets start with a simple case – getting a list of patients seen by a consultant on a specified date. This is not quite as simple as it sounds!

Read more of this post

Filed under Clinical Tagged with

FHIR, SMART and Sidecar Applications

July 10, 2015 4 Comments

I was reading the SMART on FHIR support group and came across this post from Wes Rishel. I thought it was really good, and so asked him if I could duplicate here. Not only did he agree, but he added some more stuff to it!
Thanks Wes…

Read more of this post

Filed under SMART Tagged with