FHIR Versions and Conformance URLs

As you probably know, there are a number of ‘conformance’ resources in FHIR that have a unique ‘canonical’ Url that identifies them globally. Other resources that need to refer to them can do so by addressing them by that URL – for example when a profile (Core or Derived) binds a coded element to a ValueSet, it does so via that URL – as does a Profile referencing an Extension Definition (both Profile and Extension Definition are StructureDefinition resources).

Looking at the definition of the Url in the spec:

For StructureDefinition:

An absolute URI that is used to identify this structure definition when it is referenced in a specification, model, design or an instance. This SHALL be a URL, SHOULD be globally unique, and SHOULD be an address at which this structure definition is (or will be) published. The URL SHOULD include the major version of the structure definition.

For ValueSet

An absolute URI that is used to identify this value set when it is referenced in a specification, model, design or an instance. This SHALL be a URL, SHOULD be globally unique, and SHOULD be an address at which this value set is (or will be) published. The URL SHOULD include the major version of the value set.

So how do you accomplish this across different versions of FHIR?

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Creating documents in clinFHIR 

I did a demo of clinFHIR for the Clinicians on FHIR group that will be meeting at the Working Group Meeting next week, and completely forgot to talk about creating/viewing documents in clinFHIR using the scenario builder. This is functionality that has been around for a while, and allows you to create a FHIR document by adding a Composition resource to the scenario, and then linking up the other resource to it.

So I thought I’d do a post on it!

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FHIR Core Extensions

A really short post to record how to download the core extensions in the spec (This came up in a FHIR Chat today). They can be found at:

This is particularly useful if you are setting up your own FHIR server and want to pre-load them with the code definitions in the spec. Just download from the link above, remove the id from the bundle, change the bundle type to ‘batch’ and POST to the root of the server.

Thanks Lloyd!