Thoughts about updating Registries

July 9, 2019 3 Comments

In New Zealand we are lucky enough to have had a national patient registry for some years which serves as a unique identifier of patients in New Zealand – the National Health Index or NHI. The Registry is an instance of an EMPI (Enterprise Master Patient Index) and currently  exposes a SOAP interface that can be accessed by clients across a protected network.

In order to make it available for more users we are working in a project to expose a FHIR API that will offer similar functionality to the existing SOAP one, be simpler to use, available across the public Internet and so accessible to a wider range of clients in support of the healthcare ecosystem. We’re also looking at similar work for Provider registries.

Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized

FHIR Bundle Visualizer

June 1, 2019 13 Comments

So a little while back I wrote about an app I developed during the WGM Connectathon to send an HL7 v2 message to a converter app, and display the response (a FHIR Bundle) in a number of visualizations after validating it using the community supplied validation tool (actually, exposed by the reference servers via the $validate operation). It occurred to me that this visualization might be of use to implementers who are developing query applications – such as the CSIRO Primary Care project for example, so I pulled it out into a separate application.

Read more of this post

Filed under clinFHIR, Uncategorized Tagged with

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a beer box!

May 21, 2019 Leave a comment

At the last HL7 Working Group Meeting my good friend Brian Postlethwaite shared with us a video on how he made a plane out of a beer carton! This is so quintessentially Australian (and New Zealand), that I just had to share…

(Can’t wait to see what he does for an encore!)

Updated: here is the encore. This is why New Zealand always beats Australia at Rugby –  we know that the idea is to go BETWEEN the poles…  (The best bit us at 24 seconds)…

Filed under Uncategorized

FHIR Documents (and other stuff)

May 11, 2019 4 Comments

I had an email from a company which had a number of really good questions about exposing data through FHIR, so I thought I’d write a post about it rather than just replying directly as it may be of interest to others (and also gives others the opportunity to disagree with me 🙂 )

Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized

Converting v2 to FHIR

May 9, 2019 4 Comments

At the recent Working Group Meeting in Montreal, I participated in the ‘v2 to FHIR’ stream – focused on how can the HL7 community give advice to implementers about converting v2 messages into FHIR bundles.

Broadly there are 2 approaches to this conversion:

  • The creation of a FHIR message bundle that mirrors the contents of the v2 message, and is intended to be an equivalent representation, behaving in the same way as v2 messages
  • Using the contents of the v2 message to update a FHIR server – perhaps extracting Encounter resources or creating a Bundle that is intended to act as a ‘transaction’ bundle against a FHIR server. I think this will be a much more common use case.

In either case, it’s desirable that HL7 should provide the mappings (insofar as that is possible in v2) from v2 to FHIR.

Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized

Importing CSV data into a FHIR server

March 25, 2019 Leave a comment

Suppose you have a csv file of data, and you want to load that into a FHIR server. There are a number of ways that you could do that – depending on the nature of the csv file and the capabilities of the FHIR server that you want to update.

Let’s work through a simple scenario.

Read more of this post

Filed under node-RED

Securing a FHIR endpoint in Node-RED

March 15, 2019 2 Comments

So in a comment to the previous post on using Node-RED to create Tasks from Assessments, Michael suggested that I talk about some of the  security considerations that you might have. There are a few ways you could make this more secure that I can think of.

  • The simplest way would be to put the whole thing behind as API manager (such as APIgee or WSO2) and delegate security to that application. In effect you are trusting the API manager.
  • Another way is to follow the SMART / OAuth process – check that a valid access token issued by an Authorization Server (Authz) has been provided in the call, rejecting the call if not.
  • And yet another option is to perform the whole OAuth2 dance – look for a valid access token, taking on the role of the Authorization server if not – validating the user and issuing tokens.

(And there will be plenty of others I’m sure). Naturally all calls will use SSL.

Let’s look a bit further into the second option – checking for a valid access token, and simply rejecting the call if there is not one present.

Read more of this post

Filed under node-RED, SMART

← Older posts

Newer posts →