Data Formatting

Letter Case

Information in patient summaries is stored as mixed case and information is preserved in the format provided by the source (e.g. ALL UPPER CASE, Mixed Case, lower case). Patient Summary consumers MAY apply data formatting rules where there is a local requirement to standardize information to a consistent format.

Extended Character Set

Information within patient summaries shall be in UTF-8 to support extended characters beyond standard ASCII/ANSI character set including French characters.

Date/Time

In this specification, the expected date format is "YYYY-MM-DD" or partial date formats “YYYY-MM” or “YYYY” in UTC format. If this format is not provided, or an invalid date is provided in the defined format, the request will be rejected. Below are the formats supported:

• 2015-01-07T13:28:17-05:00
• 2015-01-07T18:28:17Z
• 2015-01
• 2015

Telecom

For this specification, the telecom format is "+[country code]-[area code]-[exchange]-[subscriber number] ext."[extension]". Note that if country code is not used, the "+" prefix is skipped. Example: "+1-555-555-5555 ext. 123456"

URI/UUID

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) leveraged in the Alberta Patient Summary are case sensitive. URIs can be absolute or relative, and may have an optional fragment identifier. Universally Unique IDs (UUIDs) are defined in lower case format (e.g. “urn:uuid:53fefa32-fcbb-4ff8-8a92-55ee120877b7”).