Introduction
This implementation guide describes the content and organization of all the projects' implementation guides in Synapxe and also other general information such as the definition of resources, profiles, transmission specification and the API error handling.
Content and Organization
The implementation guide is organized into the following sections:
Overview - provides details of all changes, improvements and fixes of conformance resources with each version release.
Summary - includes general background information about the project and a summary of all APIs available in this project.
APIs - provides details on the API.
Terminology - provides a full list of terminology artifacts used in this implementation guide with a terminology updates subsection.
Resources
Resources are the building blocks of the FHIR standard. These resources convey the content of clinical records, identify patients or providers, or otherwise support messaging between systems. These resources have been developed by several working groups at HL7, based on members’ experience and subject expertise. These resources are intended to capture and support 80% of all implementation use case requirements; projects are encouraged to meet the remaining 20% of requirements through extensions and profile constraints. The list of all available resources in the FHIR standard can be found at https://hl7.org/fhir/resourcelist.html, with additional details at https://hl7.org/fhir/resourceguide.html.
Profiles
Resources defined in the FHIR standard are intended to support a wide variety of use cases, resulting in a large number of available elements, and very few constraints. Implementers are encouraged to create and apply FHIR Profiles, which places constraints on the defined FHIR resources – tightening cardinality, identifying unused/unsupported elements, defining value sets for elements, and adding extension elements.
Transmission Specification
The formal MIME-type for FHIR resources is application/fhir+json or application/fhir+xml. The correct mime type SHALL be used by clients and servers:
- JSON (preferred): application/fhir+json
- XML (optional): application/fhir+xml
FHIR® uses UTF-8 for all request and response bodies. Since the HTTP specification defines a default character encoding of ISO-8859-1, requests and responses SHALL explicitly set the character encoding to UTF-8 using the charset parameter of the MIME-type in the Content-Type header. Requests MAY also specify this charset parameter in the Accept header and/or use the Accept-Charset header.
Accept-Language field in HTTP header will be used to set the language of the search in the future releases. The default value is "en".