Thoughts and comments on the HL7 FHIR standard, from a FHIR Evangelist
November 15, 2021 Leave a comment
So in the previous post about the upcoming Trans-Tasman connectathon I mentioned that I was going to work on a couple of applications in the IPS track – a way of visualizing IPS documents (actually any kind of FHIR document), and a ‘façade’ application that could produce an IPS document on demand from a back-end data source.
This post is an update of where I’ve got to.
Read more of this postMay 11, 2021 1 Comment
When an Implementation Guide is built by the IG Publisher (and presumably other build applications like simplifier), one of the outputs is a zipped package (actually a tarball) that contains all the FHIR resources defined by the Implementation guide – profiles, extension definitions, terminology and conformance resources and such like. It’s based on the NPM package scheme as described on the HL7 Confluence page.
This package can then be saved in the International FHIR registry so that it can be discovered and downloaded by implementers. There’s a description of the registry on the HL7 confluence site, as well as from the registry itself.
While the package doesn’t contain the textual part of the IG, it does have all the computable artefacts that an implementer might need, as well as a manifest file (package.json) which contains a number of goodies about the IG – such as the canonical url, which can be used to view the full IG.
This post is to introduce a new clinFHIR module that can display the contents of a package. It works by downloading a copy of the package from the FHIR registry and saving it on the clinFHIR server. Subsequently, the contents can be displayed to the user. The download only needs to happen once, as a particular version of a package is immutable – it is guaranteed not to change.
October 4, 2021 6 Comments
One of the things I find myself doing quite often is helping people design FHIR API interfaces. Of course, the actual API itself is defined by the FHIR standard – but the parts that are implemented by any given system will vary tremendously – particularly with regard to API features like chaining, reverse chaining and the _include search parameter.
What I find very useful is to create a small set of sample data and save to a generic FHIR server (I use the HAPI server generally, though there are others available these days). Then, I can test out the API calls against that sample data set to make sure I have the syntax right – and they are returning the results I expect.
Read more of this postSeptember 11, 2022 2 Comments
Recently I was asked by a local vendor what was the best way to record a recall in a Practice Management System (PMS).
As background, in New Zealand (and likely elsewhere) it is common for a Primary Care Practitioner (what we call a General Practitioner) to create a ‘recall’ for a patient. These are essentially reminders that a patient needs a follow up for some purpose within some time frame.
Examples of recalls include:
April 6, 2021 1 Comment
So we’ve talked about how to represent an immunization program both in the abstract (the overall definition of a national plan) and the specific (the plan applied to an individual). In addition, we discussed how to submit the actual administrations to the registry.
What we haven’t really talked about is how to measure the performance of an individual against the plan.
Read more of this postDecember 5, 2021 3 Comments
Just a short post to follow up on using GraphBuilder for building examples.
To help support people building R5 examples for connectathon, I’ve added the ability to select the version of FHIR to use for the graph. Currently the R4 and R5 draft release are supported (as these are the versions that sushi supports).
Read more of this postMay 26, 2021 5 Comments
In this post we’re going to take a look at more aspects of coding data. We spent a bit of time in the last post describing why we want to have data coded, how FHIR supports coded data – especially the external terminologies where the concepts are defined – and described some of the RESTful API calls that we could make to retrieve specific Observations and DiagnosticReports from the repository.
But in doing so, we make one key assumption – that all the data in the repository was properly coded with consistent codes – and this is actually not that common in the real world, especially for repositories that are collecting data from different sources. (It’s a bit easier when it is a single lab exposing their data and have complete control over the coding used)
So let’s think about how to manage the situation where there may be different codes that mean the same thing, a good example of which is where labs are using their own coding system rather than an external one such as LOINC.
Ideally what we want to be able to do is ‘map’ all of the codes that mean the same thing to a single concept – preferably a concept from a known codesystem which as LOINC or SNOMED.
We’ll focus on setting up the ‘definitional’ part of the mapping here – in the next post we’ll talk about implementing it.
February 18, 2023 3 Comments
So I’ve written an earlier post describing how you can use the excellent HAPI FHIR engine to host your own FHIR server. This used the CLI (Command Line Interface) tool, and has worked well for me in the past – for example most of the clinFHIR modules have used this as the back end storage.
However, this is definitely only useful for development and testing, and recently there have been some issues running the more recent versions of the CLI so I decided to take a closer look at other options – in particular using Docker to host the server.
Read more of this postMarch 26, 2021 8 Comments
In New Zealand (and other places as well I expect) we’ve had a national registry for immunizations for a number of years – the National Immunization Register or NIR
It’s currently fed by HL7 version 2 messages and there’s a User Interface for authorized users, but there was always a plan to introduce a FHIR interface to some point – something that has been accelerated by the current COVID pandemic of course.
Read more of this postApril 12, 2021 7 Comments
I’ve been asked to give a short talk about clinFHIR to a course at Johns Hopkins this month – what it is and what you’d use it for, so to organize my thoughts I decided to write a ‘stock take’ of clinFHIR modules. This is actually part of a project I’ve been working on for a little while – learning FHIR with clinFHIR – so it’s a perfect time to be doing it.
The idea for clinFHIR started shortly after FHIR started to gain prominence within HL7 – coming up to 10 years ago now. The technical folk understood what the developers were trying to do – utilize internet standards to share healthcare data – but it was harder for the clinical folk to gain that understanding and appreciate the significance.
clinFHIR (Clinical FHIR) was envisaged as a way to visualize FHIR – particularly resources and the references between them – so that the committees within HL7 responsible for authoring resources could advance their development. We worked closely with the members of the ‘Patient Care’ committee in particular – they had sessions at most Working Group Meetings called ‘Clinicians on FHIR’, and we developed clinFHIR as one of the main tools for them.
(And I’d like to recognize all the work they put into this – it was an on-going balance between evolving the application to meet identified needs, and dealing with the bugs that a rapid development cycle brings!)
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