HSWT
(Have Stethoscope Will Travel)
(Have Stethoscope Will Travel)
Not bad for some alliteration, huh? As a co-fellow was pointing out earlier today, having some documentation to show what you've done in case anyone ever thinks it's worthwhile isn't a bad thing. So, I need to start taking more detailed notes of this journey.
First things, I'm more convinced than ever that FHIR is a good technology that more people should look at. That said, I'm going to do my best to help anyone interested as I learn about it too.
Part of the reason FHIR is nice is that it's essentially formatted as a long string with some punctuation that tells the computer how to display it. But humans can mostly read it too. The example here isn't very detailed, but gives a very brief example of a patient. As always, if you wanted to read the full specification, head over to http://hl7.org/fhir/ .
OK, so say you want to play with this, and you're not sure where to start. You probably need a server to play with. There are lots of sandboxes out there, and some of them have good tutorials too (HSPC is the only one I remember off of the top of my head). However, if you want to run your own, it's probably going to take a bit more work. But there are still a number out there that can help. Personally, I'm going to give a shout-out to Aidbox and Hapi. So why these two? Well, the first is that they're both open source. You can download and spin up either of their servers on your own, if you want to. However, they both also have servers that they will maintain for you in the cloud. Hapi is based on Java, Aidbox is written in Clojure (it's ok, I had to look it up too).
I'm going to mainly be focusing on Aidbox, because it's the one I'm going to be using the most. Here's a link if you'd like to setup a test server to play with (you don't even have to host it, they'll do that for you). Their instructions are pretty good for this, straight forward to download your own (although you will need to be running Docker), or just signup for their online dev version.
Alright, that's how to get the server started. Next we'll talk about how to talk to it.
{
"resource": {
"resourceType": "Patient",
"name": [
{
"given": [
"Jaba"
],
"family": "The Hutt"
}
],
"birthDate": "1980-07-27",
"id": "b26646dd-c549-4981"
}