Developing With UKCore
The UK Core adds in country specific constraints on top of the base international standard. The UK Core package along with the corresponding Implementation Guide (IG) shows only the differences between the base HL7 standard, and is expected to be used along side it.
The latest version of UK Core can be found here.
The are called Profiles and are discussed on HL7 FHIR Profiling
For example:
UKCore-Organization adds in guidance on how to represent ODS Code in the UK (it should have a identifier.system of https://fhir.nhs.uk/Id/ods-organization-code).
UKCore-Patient adds in guidance on how to represent NHS Number in the UK (it should have a identifier.system of https://fhir.nhs.uk/Id/nhs-number).
Many of the other profiles will have recommended UK SNOMED CT concepts to be used.
The guidance will generally follow the NHS Data Model and Dictionary, they will mostly be consistent with other UK HL7 v2 and v3 data models and follow NHS England Information Standards.
NHS England and Wales Implementation Guides
Like how UKCore builds on the international standard, England and Wales have their own guides, these are still UK Core compliant but have extra guidance and rules:
For example:
NHSDigital-Practitioner has more extensive guidance on the use of practitioner codes and is can be used to test format of the codes. DataStandardsWales-Practitioner
Both have chosen to make Practitioner.name mandatory and Practitioner.identifier is mandatory in England, with Wales have a strong preference for this to be present. Also they have both chosen to add Practitioner.identifier slices to the UKCore-Practitioner. It is probable that the union of both the England and Welsh profiles will feed into UKCore. This would not effect any implementations which followed either of the English or Welsh profiles.
UKCore Reference Implementation
| Reference Implementations |
|---|
| UKCore Reference Implementation (prototype) |
The UKCore Reference Implementation follows UKCore and so adds in extra constraints and rules. While Getting Started with FHIR, it is probably better to avoid UKCore but as you build your product it recommended you swap to using UKCore resources.
UKCore Testing/FHIR Validation
It is recommended developers focus on implementing resources before moving onto more complex FHIR Interactions which are typically found in NHS England implementations of FHIR. Some of these contain interactions with a large number of FHIR resources, so start with individual resources and then progress to the FHIR Messaging interactions.
Prototype UKCore FHIR Validator
Is built on the the HL7 FHIR Validation tools listed in the getting started section. It adds in:
- UK Terminology Validation (UK SNOMED CT) - Due to operational reasons the UK Ontology server can't be used with HL7 FHIR Validators.
- FHIR Message Validation - Which is not supported in HL7 FHIR Validations.