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Profiles & Interactions

Introduction

This DHDR FHIR specification builds upon the base FHIR profiles defined in the EHR Simplifier project. It reuses these profiles where possible to ensure consistency and alignment with foundational EHR interoperability profiles. The profiles within this project are primarily intended for consumer use cases. While most are leveraged as-is from the base EHR project, some profiles have been specifically created in this IG to address additional requirements.

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.

This implementation guide leverages the base EHR project’s profiles wherever possible, ensuring consistency across implementations. However, some profiles have been developed specifically within this IG to support additional consumer-focused requirements.

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 allowed values are “en-CA” and “fr-CA”. If this field is not set by the requestor, the default is “en-CA”. In the current release, only “en-CA” is supported.

Ontario DHDR FHIR® Resources

Document (Bundle) Medication Dispense

The MedicationDispense resource contains several references to other resources, e.g. the originating prescription (MedicationRequest resource), the prescriber (Practitioner resource), the patient (Patient resource), etc. The diagram below illustrates the resources that are referenced by the MedicationDispense resource.

Document (Bundle) Medication Dispense

Summary of Operations