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Towards the Support of Design Patterns in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Standard

Authors:
Timoteus Ziminski
Steven Demurjian
Thomas Agresta
Edward VanBaak

Keywords: design patterns; FHIR standard; interoperability; data design

Abstract:
The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) advanced the Health Level 7 v2 (HL7), Extensible Markup Language v3 (XML), and Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standards by defining over 135 resources that conceptualize the different aspects of healthcare data to facilitate the secure exchange of data for patients using cloud-based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As part of the design and development process of FHIR applications, a subset of the resources would be chosen to satisfy application requirements. While the FHIR standard is excellent at conceptualizing resources, this process is very targeted at the implementation level. FHIR provides no higher-level constructs to organize resources in a predevelopment process similar to what is available in software design patterns, which arose when developers noticed that they were constantly reimplementing the same types of functionalities in the same way for different applications. Our prior work extended the FHIR standard with meta resources, a conceptual construct that defines the involved resources and their interactions into one unified artifact akin to a design pattern, with the ability to generate a FHIR XML schema bundle that could serve as the foundation in a development workflow. This paper examines the way that our previously defined meta resource extension to FHIR can be positioned within the FHIR standard by: considering the relation between meta resources and resources that extends the FHIR Unified Modeling Language (UML) model; assessing the ability of the abstract DomainResource to implement containment in meta resources; exploring FHIR modules that provide organizational and contextual information different resources; examining the way that meta resources fit into the FHIR information architecture; and, determining if it is possible to employ a composition of Library resources and ActivityDefiniton resources in support of realizing meta resources.

Pages: 15 to 22

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2021

Publication date: October 3, 2021

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8491

ISBN: 978-1-61208-916-4

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 3, 2021 to October 7, 2021