Slicing with Sushi

May 1, 2020 11 Comments

As readers will know, I’m a big fan of FHIR Shorthand as a way of making it much easier to create Implementation Guides and examples in conjunction with the IG publisher. In fact, I’m coming to the conclusion that all systems that expose FHIR API’s should have an IG that describes it (along with the CapabilityStatement resource of course) – and unless you have experience with creating StructureDefinitions directly, then FSH – and SUSHI – is the way to go.

Of course, creating IG’s is still not easy (it’s just easier) so I thought it would be a good idea to write about common patterns that you might want to express – and serve as a reminder for me when I forget! Read more of this post

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Connectathon – with sushi

January 24, 2020 3 Comments

The 23rd FHIR connectathon in Sydney is almost upon us, and despite the trials and tribulations that the weather has thrown at us, it’s going to be a great event with over 150 people currently scheduled to attend. There are 15 tracks, a number of which are for local initiatives (like the Primary Care track or ePrescribing track) as well as the more general ones, so there’s plenty of choice for attendees. We do recommend that you choose one track as your primary track – perhaps observing others of particular interest – as that seems to bring the best benefit to attendees and the spec.

For myself, I’m going to participate in the FHIR shorthand  track. This is an initiative being driven by the Mitre Corporation in the US, which is a not-for-profit organization heavily involved in the FHIR community to create a simpler way to produce FHIR profiles.

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Slicing with Forge

August 12, 2019 5 Comments

This is a ‘so I can remember how I did it later’ post.

Slicing in FHIR is where you take an element that can repeat and create ‘sub-lists’ which have specific values. The example in the spec involves slicing the Observation.component element to represent a Blood Pressure measurement where you want to record the systolic and diastolic values in a single observation.

In my example I wanted to create a slice on Patient.identifier as part of the work we’re doing for the NHI (National Health Identifier) interface. Because patients are frequently duplicated in the NHI registry, it’s common for a single person to have a number of different identifiers – the current ‘active’ one, and any number of ‘old’ ones – numbers that were assigned to duplicate entries than have been merged or linked (we call them dormant ones).

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FHIR Versions and Conformance URLs

September 25, 2017 9 Comments

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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Implementation Guide viewer

July 25, 2017 8 Comments

Just a short post to describe some updates to the Implementation Guide viewer (which I’ve renamed from ‘profile viewer’ as it was described in this post.) Thanks to some comments in the FHIR chat from my friend John Moehrke I’ve done some work on the ‘Graph visualizer’ component of the viewer.

The idea is to make it easier to understand the contents of an Implementation Guide, and the relationships between them. Currently limited to Profiles, Extensions & ValueSets – but no reason why it couldn’t be extended (or won’t be 🙂 ).

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Filed under clinFHIR, Profile

clinFHIR profile viewer

June 26, 2017 2 Comments

Over the years I’ve made a number of attempts to build a profile viewer – to a mixed amount of success. The issue is becoming more urgent though, as profiles (as part of Implementation Guides) start to become published, and vendors such as Orion Health need to think about how we are to support them.

The issue is even more important for vendors in the international space, as our solutions are going to have to support different profiles in different countries, and we cannot assume that the profiles will be in alignment even for the same concept.

We’re not going to solve that issue right now (though it does highlight that the developers of profiles need to be aware of it and ideally working to avoid it as much as possible), but the ability to view profiles from different jurisdictions and analyse them in a common way is going to be important. Read more of this post

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Changing a ValueSet in a profile

June 21, 2017 3 Comments

I learned something today.

Actually, most days I do learn something (and occasionally remember it later on) but this one is worth recording here.

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Creating an Extension Definition – part 3: Coded items

April 29, 2017 4 Comments

A common data type that is likely to be added in an extension are coded types – those where the value in an instance comes from a pre-defined set of possible values. There are a couple of extra things that you need to do for these.

First, a quick review of the basics.

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Creating an Extension Definition – part 2: The URL.

April 12, 2017 5 Comments

In the previous post, we talked about the steps you might follow when creating an Extension Definition as part of profiling a resource. There were 2 steps that we glossed over because of space – the url, and extra work required for coded datatypes and identifiers. Let’s take a look at the url.

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So you want to create a FHIR extension?

April 12, 2017 5 Comments

 

Most people familiar with FHIR will be aware of profiling resources – and in particular adding new elements to resources for a specific use case – adding an extension. It seems straightforward, but there are a number of things to think about when you do this so – or so we’ve found at Orion Health!

In this post we’ll talk about some of the factors involved – less about the technology and how they work in FHIR and more about some of the design time issues.

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