FHIR R4 Contract API

Overview

This asset is a component of MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare.

MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare enables healthcare providers to unlock critical patient data to build a patient 360 within Salesforce Health Cloud, faster and easier than ever before. The solution includes pre-built APIs, connectors, integration templates, and prescriptive end-to-end reference architecture to bring patient demographics information and COVID-19 test results from any EHR into Health Cloud using HL7 V2 or FHIR standards.

The solution also provides a library of United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and FHIR R4 resources to help healthcare developers adhere to interoperability needs and jumpstart the development of healthcare digital transformation initiatives.

Use case covered

This resource allows for the instantiation of various types of legally enforceable agreements or policies as shareable, consumable, and executable artifacts as well as precursory content upon which instances may be based or derivative artifacts supporting management of their basal instance. The resource is general enough to encode broad range of legal artifacts such as:

• A Contract instance, which may undergo legal state transitions during its formation.

• Templates for or agreed upon instances of rules, obligations, and prohibitions.

• An organizational or jurisdictional policy, for example, for establishing rules of conduct or obligations necessary to achieve societal goods. Or it may encode a contract instance, which may be accepted by one party in exchange of considerations offered by another party.

• A derivative of a contract instance for purposes of workflow management of the agreement, e.g., for retrieval or indication of agreed upon terms, such as entities allowed to exchange governed assets.

Contracts are promises or understandings that are enforceable by law in case of any violation or breech by any involved party or organization. A Contract instance may be a unilateral mandate such as a policy, or a unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral agreement, which impacts the influence of the parties over the terms of the agreement, and the burdens and risks incurred.

Contract Resource may be typed to support multiple types of domain policies and contractual agreements, and specializations of those types.

A Contract instance must include at least one term with an offer, which obligates the offerer to or not to do, perform, or effectuate some action in exchange for some consideration in return from the offeree, e.g., another obligatory action or non-action, or an asset.

The Contract action element follows the Request Pattern to describe the proposal, plan, or order to effectuate the obligatory service or activity specified in a term’s offer. The Contract action may reference and specify the roles for one or more target entities, the requesters, and performers. By following the Request Pattern, the Contract provides the criteria needed to assess whether the contract obligations have been enforced, for example, in the case of a privacy policy, by an access control system.

The Contract asset element supports detailed description of the consideration being exchanged in a Contract instance or the satisfaction of a policy imperative such as the obligation to render aid as required by local law.

The Contract valuedItem element supports detailed description of the monetary worth of a Contract asset being marketed, the price of products being sold, or the property taxes required under a jurisdictional tax law.

A Contract may be used as a content derivative, which contains the minimal content derived from the basal information source at a specific stage in its lifecycle, which is needed for management and communications about the basal information source. For example, the metadata used to register a Contract’s characteristics and retrieval address in a federated registry/repository exchange ecosystem.

In addition to other uses of derivatives, the Contract Resource may function simply as the computable representation of the executed contract, which may be the attached to the Contract Resource as the 'legally binding' scanned paper contract attachment or referenced location, or as the 'friendly' electronic form such as an html page or a QuestionnaireResponse.

By using the Contract linkID elements, which are associated with key Contract elements, a Contract Resource may be automatically populated with the values expressed in a related QuestionnaireResponse.

Note that the Contract Resource may be considered the legally binding contract only if it is intended to be the sole 'executed' encoding of this contract, and includes the legally binding signatures. I.e., even if the Contract Resource is populated based on content in a hard-copy contract or an electronic contract form intended to collect both the content and the signature of relevant parties to the contract, if contracting parties have agreed or acknowledged that the Contract Resource conveys the binding and enforceable legal contract and that it is fully traceable to the forms used to collect its content, meeting the legal concept of being within the 'four corners of a contract', i.e., that the meaning of the contract, will, or deed is represented solely by this instance of the Contract Resource. This usage could be implemented with digital ledger technology to form a 'smart contract' to the extent that an instance supports elements critical to computable algorithms intended to achieve some output.

Where the Consent resource applies, the Consent resource should be used. Where a Contract exists for a consent directive then if a Consent for this also exists the Consent shall reference the Contract.

This API uses FHIR R4 Contract Library.

More information about FHIR R4 Contract specification can be found here.