clinFHIR Package Viewer

May 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.

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clinFHIR stock take

April 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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FHIR enabling an Immunization registry – part 4

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.

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FHIR enabling an Immunization registry – part 3

March 30, 2021 6 Comments

So we’ve made a few proposals in the last couple of posts:

The next thing to think about is how to generate the ImmunizationRecommendation (IR) from the PlanDefinition.

This could be really complicated, depending on the circumstances around the generation. For example, if we just wanted the recommendation for a new born then it’s quite easy. If we wanted more ‘smarts’ – e.g. the recommendation for someone of a given age considering their immunization and clinical history, then it becomes rather more complicated. In this post we’ll keep it simple and not look at the patient’s history, focusing on the ‘mechanics’ of the generation.

As a background to the discussion, let’s think about how a client might use the registry API.

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FHIR enabling an immunization registry – part 2

March 27, 2021 4 Comments

In the previous post we discussed how an immunization registry might receive Immunization resources documenting the administration of vaccines to an individual (complicated), and how to expose those resources to a client (easy).

But vaccine administrations don’t exist in a vacuum – they’re generally related to some particular plan consisting of multiple administrations of different vaccines over a period of time with the intent of providing the recipient with protection against specific diseases. (And, as COVID has emphasized, protection of the planetary population as a whole).

So we need a way to represent that general plan, customize it for an individual – and then a way to link individual vaccine administrations back to that plan so we can be sure that an individual is receiving the vaccinations they should be. And we want to be able to report on this administration at a population level as well as the individual.

That’s a bit more complicated than it might appear.

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FHIR enabling an immunization registry

March 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.

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Filed under Immunization, Messaging, version 2

Extending a required binding on ContactPoint

March 2, 2021 4 Comments

So we’ve got an interesting issue in New Zealand (from a FHIR perspective of course). We’re in the process of creating extensions to be used nationally, and one of the requirements we have is to be able to store the HealthLink EDI number – an ‘address’ used to send information electronically between healthcare providers.

Some background: in New Zealand we have a messaging service that is operated by a private company (HealthLink) which has national coverage that connects Primary care with Hospitals, Laboratories and other services such as eReferrals. It’s actually been running for a number of decades and has certainly helped with electronic sharing of information. The company provides vendors with client-side applications they they use to interact with the service.

Users of the service are assigned a unique code (the EDI number) that acts as a delivery address for the user (which can be an individual or an organization). For example, when a hospital wishes to send a Discharge Summary to the patient’s General Practitioner (their Primary / Ambulatory care provider) then they will send the summary to the service, asking for it to be delivered to that EDI account.

As we move into FHIR, the question is how do we represent that number? For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll assume that we wish to attach it to a Practitioner resource, though it will also need to be applied to others such as Organization or PractitionerRole.

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Using prototypes in app design

August 18, 2020 1 Comment

I’ve always been fond of creating functional prototypes when designing apps. There are a number of advantages over simply documenting what the app should do:

  • It means that the users (e.g. clinicians) get to try out something that actually works (sort of) before ‘signing off’ on the requirements. This reduces the chance of delivering something that doesn’t quite meet their needs.
  • It helps significantly with the FHIR design. Assuming that the app actually communicates with a FHIR back end (which can be one of the freely available reference servers such as HAPI), then it validates the resource design (which resources are needed and their profiling) as well as the API’s that are going to be needed. This can be quite a tricky step to implement depending on what the real back end is going to be.
  • It’s much simpler and quicker to develop than anything that needs to be ‘production ready’. For example, you don’t generally need to implement any security or handle the errors that need to be allowed for in a real application.
  • It delivers solid requirements to the development team, as well as a test app that they can use as the API is developed.

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Filed under clinFHIR, development

Slicing with Sushi

May 1, 2020 10 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

Filed under Profile, sushi, Uncategorized

Custom Implementation Guide templates

March 12, 2020 4 Comments

As you’ll likely be aware, FHIR uses Implementation Guides (IG) to describe how to use FHIR for specific scenarios or use cases. In the past it has been technically challenging to create these guides, but this is changing – in large part due to new tooling/approaches like shorthand and sushi, but also because the FHIR community (and especially Lloyd) have been working on a template based publisher.

The idea behind the template based publisher is that there are a number of standard templates for specific purposes such as an ‘official’ HL7 FHIR IG or a plain template, and these can then be adapted for specific purposes – such as a National IG or a vendor specific one describing a FHIR based implementation. The project is still relatively new, but becoming stable enough that people are able to use it. However, the newness means that the documentation is still catching up, so when my colleague Jose Costa Teixeira offered to write a ‘beginners guide to creating your very own template’ I said great!

He’s published it on his blog, but kindly allowed me to reproduce it here.

Without further ado, take it away Jose… Read more of this post

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