Tuesday 19 February 2013

FHIR Patient


FHIR patient admin details are fleshing out now with support for identifiers, address, phone and email.

This basically involves filling in a number of FHIR datatypes with appropriate content.

The FHIR Identifier datatype still has a kind of equivalence to II in HLV3 datatypes, now 'system' and 'id'.  'system' (like to 'root' in V3 II)  allows the declaration of a namespace using a URI so this supports:

  • OID as a namespace for 'id'  e.g. urn:oid:2.16.840.1.113883.16.4.3.2.5
  • UUID as a namespace for 'id' e.g. urn:uuid:76d9bbf-f293-4fb7-ad4c-2851cac77162
  • "urn:ietf:rfc:3986"  - states that 'id' value will be a URI, complete id
  • Custom URN namespace e.g. http://www.acmehosp.com/patients
  • 'Managed' URN namespaces, HL7 controlled see: Identifier Systems
This gels together a number of common identifier namespace/system method into a workable solution.  
The 'id' value (like 'extension' in V3 II)  is the actual identifier - some processing is simplified as now even globally unique values are stored in 'id' when 'urn:ietf:rfc:3986' is used as the 'system'.   This seems easier than the V3 datatype II way of checking if 'extension' exists before you know whether  'root' is a namespace or a globally unique id itself.  

The other obvious thing of note is the inclusion of the 'period' element which allows start and end time of the identifier to be included.  This helps represent common 'human identifiers' where you likely have a card or such defining your id.  This probably has an issue date and an expiry date so useful to define the currency of the identifier if it is available.

I'll add something about Address and Contact in the future....

I really want to get stuck into the search capability around patient and then look at tiniest of useful client applications, the patient contact directory, based on the Patient resource!

Check out patient records on the demo server actually some almost useful content.  You can dial up patients direct for an id range @1 to @43 on url like http://demo.oridashi.com.au:8190/patient/@N.




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