Northern Region Patient Demographics FHIR API
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Northern Region FHIR Implementation Guide
http://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7NZ/northernRegion/branches/master/index.html
Overview
Patient demographic API is one of the most consumed APIs in the healthcare services environment. Patient Management System (PAS) is the source of truth for the patient demographics, patient hospital encounters, and the main information source for outpatient scheduling and theatre bookings. There are four major PAS systems across the Northern Region (NR), one from each DHBs (i.e., ADHB, CMH, WDHB and NDHB). With the current state implementation, neither of the PAS systems is offering a web-based patient demographic APIs consumable via lightweight transport protocol nor the implementation of the dominant industry interoperability standards. With the trend of API-led integration and connectivity, businesses are constantly demanding for APIs built with modern technologies and are able to support both syntactic and semantic interoperability in order to be consumed by a variety of business innovations or new service-enabled vendor solutions, and more importantly to modernise and surface the valuable data captured in the legacy systems.
Purpose
The purpose of the FHIR Patient API is to provide a regional published API for retrieving real-time patient demographic information with associated general practitioner details for Private Consumer applications, such as:
- File My Report (for distributing PDFs from source systems to 3M Chartlinc and Eclair) Project
- Regional Oncology Electronic System
Use-case
PD-UC2: Identify Patient using NHI and managing organisation
Limitations
- Use Case PD-UC1: Identify Patient using different search parameters (i.e., NHI, patient names, gender, date of birth)
- Use Case PD-UC3: Get Patient Contact Persons using input Managing Organisation and NHI
- Terminology Server is not yet available.
- Terminology Transformations will not be performed. This means that -
- Consumer will have to manually refer to the Data Guide for all valuesets
- API will surface coded elements with their descriptions based on the local terminologies used by the DHB PAS systems, except for FHIR elements that are bound by required binding definitions - e.g., Gender and Sex at Birth. There will not be any transformation of coded elements that are defined in FHIR standards as having "extensible" or "preferred" binding strengths.
- Returning Demographic data from multiple DHBs. The API does not have the ability to query the Patient without the input Managing Organisation. This feature was not provided since there is no capability yet to perform patient demographic deduplication.
- Patient Demographic Data Limitations
- Returning "authorised for use" Patient phone details. Current Northern Region DHBs do not have a means to distinguish restricted patient phone numbers.
- Gender Identity and Sex at Birth - Current ADHB and NDHB PAS use 1 field to capture Gender Identity and Sex at Birth. Future PAS migration and upgrades will capture Gender and Sex at Birth in separate fields.
- Standard Address Format. API presently do not reformat any addresses (e.g., patient address, practice address). Instead, addresses sourced from NR DHB PAS systems are expected to conform to NZ Post standard address format.