Business Model
Context
The Ontario Health Subscription Service is a foundational asset enabling real-time, event-driven data exchange across Ontario’s healthcare ecosystem. Designed to support FHIR-based Pub/Sub architecture, it allows healthcare systems to subscribe to specific clinical and administrative events, ensuring timely notifications and seamless information flow.
Key Capabilities:
- Event-Driven Notifications – Supports HL7 FHIR Subscription to deliver real-time updates on lab results, medication dispenses, patient admissions, and more.
- Scalability & Interoperability – Integrates with various healthcare systems, including EHRs, EMRs, HIEs, and registries, leveraging FHIR R5 Backport Subscription profiles.
- Secure & Standards-Based – Implements FHIR, OAuth2, and SMART on FHIR for secure, standards-compliant data sharing.
- Enhanced Care Coordination – Ensures that providers, clinicians, and public health agencies receive critical information to support patient care and system efficiency.
Conceptual Architecture
The following diagram illustrates the Ontario Health Pub-Sub conceptual architecture, serving as the foundation for implementing system components, interactions, interoperability profiles, and underlying clinical terminology.
Systems
Component | Description |
---|---|
Publisher | The system that publishes events when relevant data changes occur |
Topic | Specific type of healthcare event that subscribers can register for to receive real-time notifications. It acts as a predefined category of events, ensuring consistency and standardization in how notifications are triggered and delivered across the healthcare ecosystem |
Event Processor | Determines if a notification should be sent to a client based on the topics that listen to the resources in the notification data. If the data received from the publisher satisfies the topic resource trigger tests component will invoke the subscription notification processor for each subscription subscribed to the topic. |
Notification Processor | The componenet used to filter event and notify subscribers when an event occurs |
Subscription Manager | Allow clients to receive notification events from an individual topic. Clients can create, get, update, and delete their subscriptions to any topic. Subscriptions Manager can filter notification events from an individual topic. Clients can receive a history of past notifications using the $events operation, and can also query the status of their subscription using $status. Clients cannot modify other subscriptions they did not create since an authentication token is used to validate requests. |
Subscriber | The system that receives and processes notifications from the Subscription Manager |
Subscription Repository | The structured data store that manages and tracks FHIR Subscription resources. |