The HSPC Sandbox is taking steps toward supporting FHIR profile storage, retrieval and validation. Along with this effort comes the storage/hosting of the terminology necessary to accommodate the profiling features. In this blog post I will outline the upcoming features related to profiles, along with some examples of how these features can be useful in the development of SMART on FHIR apps. The efforts are currently focused on support for FHIR STU3, and all examples and documentation are using this FHIR version.
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Terminology is at the heart of all FHIR resources. Because of this, we've dedicated a sandbox in the HSPC Sandbox Reference API to the storage and retrieval of terminology. This sandbox conforms the FHIR specification of a Terminology Service, and can be used by clients to "...make use of codes and value sets without having to become experts in the fine details of code system, value set and concept map resources, and the underlying code systems and terminological principles." (source). The HSPC Sandbox Terminology Service contains more than 631,310 concepts and relationships, broken down as follows:
- SNOMED CT International RF2 (336,893 concepts)
- LOINC 1.61 (111,803 concepts)
- HL7 v2 & HL7 v3 codes backing FHIR v3.0.1
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This operation can be useful in ensuring that no data is lost in the creation of the resource. If we were to add a field which isn't defined on the server (not contained in the StructureDefinition), it is acceptable behavior for the server to discard this field and save the remiander remainder of the data. To avoid this, your application can call the validate endpoint before each save or update if there is any doubt about the data integrity.
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