YOUR APPLICATIONS

Victor CHAI

HL7 Singapore

Set the context …

• Do we copy and paste the external content into our site page, or we simply use URL link to reference the external content when we build a web site?

• What’re the benefits? – Prevent information proliferation, and avoid obsolete information

– There is no need to fetch all at one go, the requester can ‘follow’ the

path to navigate to the needed information, reduce the network traffic and payload size

– Each app can focus on managing its own information, and relies on reference to build up network of information

What is FHIR

• FHIR® – Fast Health Interoperable Resources (hl7.org/fhir) – is a next generation standards framework created by HL7

• FHIR solutions are built from a set of modular components called “Resources”

FHIR Overview

• “Resource “ is unit of transactional data such as patient or encounter data that is stored or exchanged

• Easily accessible

– http://server.org/resources/Patient/AA1234567

endpoint

resource type

Logical ID

HL7 FHIR - A network of resources

Encounter (Resource)

Patient (Reference)

Hospitalization Practitioner (Reference)

Location (Reference)

Location (Reference)

Participant

Location

Encounter Resource Definition

HL7 FHIR wire format • Supports both XML and JSON

• A Human-readable wire format for ease of use by developers

• Out of box extension support

How easy it is to implement FHIR

How is FHIR different from HL7v2 and HL7 CDA

• Combines best features of HL7v2 and HL7CDA – Simple to implement, easy to extend

• Defines application services syntax

– Besides payload, it also defines API for search/create/update/delete/read resources

• Use “Profile” to create and manage data dictionary and

Conformance toolkit – After you have implemented FHIR, you also achieved the objective of

creating data dictionary – “Profile” resource is also used for runtime structure and value set

validation as part of the conformance toolkit

HL7 FHIR RESTful API

API Services - Search

Search Parameters Search parameters for Encounter resource

HTTP Response Status Code

Resource Profile – Data Element and Code Set definition

Resource Profile – Search parameters

FHIR standardises and simplifies application design

• Use HL7 FHIR as straight-through resource API and internal object model

• There is no intermediate transformation

FHIR in Action

Setting up hl7-fhir project

Summary

• If you are keen, download the following FHIR open source project – http://sourceforge.net/projects/hl7-fhir/

– I am recruiting volunteer

• Learn from standards, adopt and adapt instead of re-invent – http://www.hl7.org/fhir

THANK YOU