Welcome to fhir-server’s documentation¶
This is a documentation on FHIR, focusing majorly on Profiling.
What is FHIR?¶
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an interoperability standard developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7) for electronic exchange of healthcare information.
FHIR describes a set of base resources, frameworks and APIs that are used in many different contexts in healthcare. However, there are variations across different healthcare practices, jurisdictions etc. As a consequence, this specification usually requires further adaptation to particular contexts of use.
Profiling in FHIR¶
The standard base resources have very generic definitions. A FHIR profile allows you to author and publish a customized, more specific resource definition, by specifying a set of constraints and/or extensions on the base resource. Concrete FHIR resources e.g. a Patient resource can express their conformance to a specific profile. This allows a FHIR server to programmatically validate a given resource against the associated profile definition.
A StructureDefinition Resource¶
This resource describes the underlying resources, data types defined in FHIR, and also extensions, and constraints on these resources and data types.
The StructureDefinition resource describes a structure - a set of data element definitions, and their associated rules of usage.