Sidharth Ramesh
Founder and CEO
FHIR stands for Fast Health Interoperability Standards and it is a standard for interoperability released by HL7. HL7’s v2 messaging format was a huge hit and is used widely to exchange health-related data. It is, however, old. And the indiscriminate use of extensions rendered it hard to keep track of what these extensions really mean. And HL7v2 was primarily meant for sending messages across a wire in response to an event.
We will not talk about HL7v3.
FHIR on the other hand, is a solution designed from scratch keeping modern web development practices in mind. Health data is represented as resources and exchanged through multiple paradigms, one of which is a RESTful server.
Take the following clinical content for example:
A 23-year-old patient from New York came with complaints of cough and fever. The blood pressure was 120/80 and the Pulse was 98 per/min. The patient has been reassured that it is the common cold. Paracetamol 500mg SOS has been prescribed.
Although it seems like a simple scenario, from the viewpoint of FHIR, this needs to be broken down into resources. In just this scenario, there are at least 6 resources.
The link to each resource will describe further how each resource is structured. Now let’s start to build your own FHIR resource.
We’ll be working with JSON data directly. Thankfully, FHIR provides a JSON schema to validate resources against. You can also use XML and the XML schema validator. In VSCode you can use the JSON schema to autocomplete fields for you based on the resource type. This comes in very handy. Here are the steps:
fhir.schema.json
.settings.json
(Ctrl + Shift + P and User settings).{
"json.schemas": {
"fileMatch": ["*.fhir.json"],
"url": "fhir.schema.json"
}
}
Note: You can replace *.fhir.json
with just *.json
, but that’ll trigger the FHIR schema validation for every json you edit.
Now let’s create our first resource. I explain all the above and how to create a resource more in detail in my video
https://www.youtube.com/embed/HdPyV6ggGA4
That’s all for this post.
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