FHIR R4 Observation 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 a 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

Observations are a central element in healthcare, used to support diagnosis, monitor progress, determine baselines and patterns and even capture demographic characteristics. Most observations are simple name/value pair assertions with some metadata, but some observations group other observations together logically, or even are multi-component observations. Note that the DiagnosticReport resource provides a clinical or workflow context for a set of observations and the Observation resource is referenced by DiagnosticReport to represent laboratory, imaging, and other clinical and diagnostic data to form a complete report.

Uses for the Observation resource include:

• Vital signs such as body weight, blood pressure, and temperature
• Laboratory Data like blood glucose, or an estimated GFR
• Imaging results like bone density or fetal measurements
• Clinical Findings* such as abdominal tenderness
• Device measurements such as EKG data or Pulse Oximetry data
• Clinical assessment tools such as APGAR or a Glasgow Coma Score
• Personal characteristics: such as eye-color
• Social history like tobacco use, family support, or cognitive status
• Core characteristics like pregnancy status, or a death assertion

*The boundaries between clinical findings and disorders remains a challenge in medical ontology. Refer the Boundaries section below and in Condition for general guidance. These boundaries can be clarified by profiling Observation for a particular use case.

This API uses FHIR R4 Observation Library.

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

More information about US Core profile can be found here.