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Scope

This Ontario eReferral - eConsult FHIR Implementation Guide supports referral patterns for various pathways such as an EMR integration with a Regional Home to Community Care Solution, Primary Care to Home and Community Care, Acute Care, Consultation Requests (eConsult) etc. It describes the business considerations and implementation details for enabling interoperability with referral management systems to initiate and manage an electronic referral request.

Three integration methods are defined in this release of the implementation guide that should facilitate a range of different referral processes and software applications with different capabilities:

(1) A SMART integration that allows a Referral Management System (RMS) to be directly launched from clinician’s Point of Service (POS) system to enable users to create an eReferral and eConsult request;

(2) A Direct Messaging integration that allows two RMS to exchange referral/consult messages (e.g., initial eReferral request, appointment updates, communications and notifications), and/or a single RMS to contribute information to an analytics repository, all via FHIR-based API interfaces; and

(3) A RESTful API integration that enables RMS systems to conduct search and read interactions, export operations to support retrieval of information from other systems.

Out of scope

At this time, the implementation guide does not cover:

• Integration with Ontario digital health assets such as Provincial Client Registry

• Semantically interoperable eReferral form templates and/or content

• System and/or user authorization and authentication

• Wait time calculations

• The ability to forward referrals

Applying the Ontario eReferral - eConsult HL7 FHIR IG

Ontario Health will be establishing the Ontario eReferral - eConsult HL7 FHIR IG as an interoperability specification under Ontario’s Digital Health Information Exchange (DHIEX) framework.

The following information is provided in accordance with section 28 of O. Reg. 329/04 made under the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), 2004.