UKCore Hackathon Supporting Guide

This guidance is under active development by NHS England and content may be added or updated on a regular basis.

Query Patient Care Data

Type Use Description Suggested Standard
Resource The Query for Existing Data for (QEDm) supports queries for clinical data elements, including observations, allergy and intolerances, conditions, diagnostic results, medications, immunisations, procedures, encounters and provenance by making the information widely available to other systems within and across enterprises. It defines a transaction used to query a list of specific data elements, persisted as FHIR resources. IHE QEDm

This pattern is quite common in Health Information Exchanges, Patient Portals and applications accessing data in other systems.

This can provide an open and consistent API standard to access patient data held in a range of existing systems such as PAS, EPR, EPMA, LIMS, etc. As data is retrieved when required by practitioners and patients, in real time, it does not have the concurrency issues which feature in methods such as Event Message Suppliers are not expected to provide API's for every data types, just those applicable their system, e.g.

  • LIMS would support diagnostic results and observations APIs
  • PAS would support encounter APIs.
  • EPMA would support medication APIs.

This is not a bulk EHR extraction method and each resource is expected to be called individually as and when a practitioner needs to the view patients data.

Description

The client sends an individual request for each data type they are interested in. For example if a practitioner wishes to view a patient (with id of 43210) conditions or problems. The practitioners app would run the following query

GET /Condition?patient=43210

This would list all the conditions recorded on the EHR system. The practitioner may only be interested in active problems, in this case the query is amended as follows.

GET /Condition?patient=43210&clinical-status=active

Not all system would support the active problem filter, it is an optional query parameter in IHE-QEDm. However if the EHR adheres to IHE-QEDm, patient support is mandatory. Searching by national identifiers (NHS or CHI Number) is not normally supported as a parameter, this is done via Patient Demographic Query which is used to obtain the patient id.

qedm

Example Implementations

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