Supported FHIR Capabilities
This section provides a conceptual overview of key FHIR capabilities supported by the FHIR Adapter.
FHIR
HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a standard for accessing and exchanging healthcare data between different computer systems regardless of how it is stored in those systems. FHIR has the potential to improve patient care by providing clinicians and patients with timely access to information in a patient’s electronic health records. FHIR enables healthcare information, including clinical and administrative data, to be available securely to those who have a need to access it for the benefit of a patient receiving care.
See HL7 FHIR.
FHIR Standard Definition Support
The FHIR standard schema definition is a published set of XSDs that the FHIR standard organization uses to model healthcare resources such as patient, observation, and others. It provides an extension framework that allows different consumers to extend the model to support different attributes while still complying with the schema.
The standard schema definition is automatically selected for you when configuring the FHIR Adapter in the Adapter Endpoint Configuration Wizard. See Configure Interaction Page.
FHIR Resources
FHIR divides healthcare data into categories such as patients, laboratory results, insurance claims, and many others. Each category is represented by a FHIR resource, which defines the details that comprise an exchangeable patient record. Resources satisfy most common healthcare patient use cases.
See Resource Index.
Oracle Integration supports a number of FHIR resources. You select a supported resource when configuring the FHIR Adapter in the Adapter Endpoint Configuration Wizard. See Configure Interaction Page.
FHIR Interactions
FHIR interactions are the set of actions to take on FHIR resources. Interactions can be grouped according to whether they act upon an instance, a type, or the whole system. FHIR supports interactions at the individual instance level (such as getting an individual resource, updating an individual resource, and deleting an individual resource) and interactions at the resource level (such as search and create).
- Read: Accesses the current contents of a resource.
See read.
- Update: Creates a new current version for an existing resource
or creates an initial version if no resource already exists for the given
ID.
See update.
- Delete: Removes an existing resource.
See delete.
- Create: Creates a new resource in a FHIR server-assigned
location.
See create.
- Search: Searches a set of resources based on a filter criteria.
Use the search interaction to retrieve resources from the FHIR resource
repository.
See search.
You select the interaction to perform when configuring the FHIR Adapter in the Adapter Endpoint Configuration Wizard. See Invoke Basic Info Page and Configure Interaction Page.
Standard and Custom Request and Response Headers
FHIR provides a number of standard headers that control the way the FHIR server returns data. FHIR also specifies a syntax for defining custom headers.
See HTTP Headers and Custom Headers.
You can select standard headers and create custom request and response headers when configuring the FHIR Adapter in the Adapter Endpoint Configuration Wizard. See Configure Interaction Page.
Search Parameters
A filter parameter can be used with the search operation. Filter requests have access to the same set of search parameters that are available to the search operation in that resource context on the FHIR server.
See Filter Parameter and Search.
You can specify search parameters when configuring the FHIR Adapter in the Adapter Endpoint Configuration Wizard. See Configure Interaction Page.
Bundle Support
Search results are returned in a bundle, which is another resource within the FHIR standard definition. A bundle is a predefined container resource that can contain an array of entries of the same resources (homogenous set of resource instances) or different resources (heterogeneous mixture of resource instances).
The bundle creation for the case of search or other type of interactions that may use the bundle can be internal and does not need any user selection or configuration. The only selection that drives the overall schema creation is the resource selection.
The following example shows the response schema generated by the FHIR Adapter for a search result with a homogenous set of resource instances in the mapper.
- For the request, the search parameters in the mapper look as
follows:
- For the response, the bundle in the mapper looks as follows: