Cleaning up clinFHIR

Just a short post for people who may have become frustrated with errors in clinFHIR when selecting patients in the Resource Builder.

What was happening is the clinFHIR keeps a note of all patients who have had resources made for them (by anyone) through the tool – to make it easier to find them later. The list is grouped by server – ie depending on the Data Server you have configured you’ll get the appropriate list.

The issue was that the current servers out there are all test servers – their purpose is to help develop the spec and ensure fitness for purpose, and this means that periodically the contents may be deleted as the resource structure has changed (or for some other purpose). So clinFHIR winds up holding on to some ‘stale’ references – hence the errors.

So there’s now an option off the main menu (it’s a gear icon at the top right of the screen) called ‘Clean local db’ that will remove these stale items from the list of patients. You shouldn’t need to use it often – and I’ve just cleaned up the current lists – but if you start getting errors where clinFHIR says it can’t load patients that it has in its list, then it’s worth a try.

And do feel free to contact me with any other issues, suggestions or whatever.

About David Hay
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.

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