Topic outline

• Use FHIR in 10 Minutes with Unified Care Record

  Use FHIR in 10 Minutes with Unified Care Record

  InterSystems HealthShare Unified Care Record® creates a unified, community-wide health record as the foundation for coordinated, value-based care and population health management. Regardless of the original format of data, HealthShare allows other applications to make HL7® FHIR® requests, ensuring efficient delivery of care.

  With Unified Care Record and FHIR, you can:

  • Optimize application performance by providing access to all data from multiple electronic medical records (even from legacy interfaces) as FHIR resources.
  • Aggregate data for an individual or population as a FHIR representation.
  • Using the built-in FHIR repository, allow applications to use all data for patient care, value-based care, quality improvement, research, and other use cases.
  • Optimize development time by requesting the capability statement to quickly identify FHIR support within Unified Care Record.

  Watch the video to learn about Unified Care Record or get hands-on with FHIR searches in the exercise below! In the exercise, you will search for a patient, retrieve observations for a patient, and explore the capability statement.
  

  
  
• Launch Unified Care Record

  Launch Unified Care Record

  When you are ready to try the below exercise, you can get immediate access, free of charge, with no download required.

   You must be logged in to launch this Unified Care Record lab.

  • Log in with your existing account.
  • Don't have an InterSystems account? Create a new account.

  
  
• Try It

  Try It

  Imagine you are building an application that will enable clinicians to help patients with diabetes. To do this, you need to request and display results for hemoglobin a1c tests, which measure the average level of blood sugar over the past two to three months.

  In this exercise, you will make a FHIR request to Unified Care Record for a sample patient, Alec DuBuque, to test these requests—which could later be built into your application.

  Easily make a FHIR request to retrieve data from Unified Care Record

  1. Verify the Virtual Machine has launched, creating an instance of Unified Care Record on a personal Ubuntu system.
  2. Click the fit-to-screen icon () at the top.
     In this VM, your credentials will allow you to make FHIR requests but do not provide access to HealthShare management pages.
  3. Open Advanced REST Client using the icon with an up and down arrow () on the left. If a pop-up window appears requesting a password, click Cancel.
     We will first request the Patient resource for Alec DuBuque and later add to it.
  4. Set the following:
     • Transaction Method: GET
     • Request URL: http://ubuntu:52773/csp/healthshare/hsods/fhir/r4/Patient?family=DuBuque&given=Alec
  5. Add headers:
     • Accept: application/fhir+json
     • Content-Type: application/fhir+json;charset=UTF-8
     • Authorization: Use the pencil icon () to modify the header value.
  6. Enter the following credentials and click Accept:
     • Username: fhir
     • Password: demo7
  7. Send the request and examine the response payload bearing Alec DuBuque’s Patient resource in a FHIR bundle. Note that Alec's Patient Resource ID is 100000005.
     Now, let's perform another query to obtain Alec's five most recent HbA1c results. Here we are retrieving Observation resources that satisfy several search parameters.
• Update the previous query and replace the resource query with:
  Observation?patient=100000005&code=4548-4&_sort=-date&_count=5

This FHIR query makes use of the following four search parameters on the Observation resource to obtain the desired results:

• patient: A resource-specific parameter for specifying the patient subject of a given Observation resource. The Patient resource id in the query corresponds to the patient record we want to retrieve.
• code: A resource-specific parameter for indicating the observation type code. In this case, 4548-4 used in the FHIR query is the LOINC code for Hemoglobin A1c in blood.
• _sort: A standard parameter for sorting, with the optional hyphen (-) prefix indicating decreasing order (in STU3 syntax). The -date sort rule used in this query sorts resources based on their effectiveDateTime values, starting with the most recent Observation.
• _count: A standard parameter for specifying how many results are to be returned by the FHIR server in a single page. Note that the total field returned in the FHIR bundle displays the total number of results before applying _count.

For more information on performing searches using the FHIR RESTful API, please consult the online FHIR specification.