Sharing Clinical Documents
| Type | Use Description | Suggested Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Document | Access to Health Documents (MHD) Profile defines one standardized interface to health document sharing (a.k.a. an Application Programming Interface (API)) for use by applications and mobile devices so that EDMS applications are more consistent and reusable. This is also the FHIR API compatible IHE XDS | IHE MHD Sharing Clinical Documents |
Description
This has both a client and consumer part. Client interactions
- The document is sent to a
document repositoryusing Send Document - This repository then updates it's index called a
document registry. In FHIR this index entry correlates with the FHIR DocumentReference resource. A client may directly add the index.
A document consumer interacts as follows.
(a). Consumer queries the index Document Registry, they may apply filters to the query to restrict results to a specific date range, care setting or document type. This is typically a REST query ran on the registry
GET /DocumentReference?patient=43210
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.
This query may return many documents, to reduce the results returned such as a filter on the date the document was created.
GET /DocumentReference?patient=43210&date=ge2020-01-01
(b). The consumer may view the document. This may be to a FHIR Binary endpoint but is often just a normal url.
Example Implementations
- National Record Locator - FHIR API Document Registry and implements interactions 2 and a in the above diagram.
- e-Referral Service Patient Care – FHIR API for referral supporting information.
- GP Connect Access Document - FHIR API FHIR STU3
- Care Connect API Suggested standard for FHIR STU3. UK equivalent of USCore.