Profiles & Operations > Operation: Search Practitioner

Search Practitioner

Practitioner search is simple RESTful interactions. It support retrieving a single Practitioner instance by Practitioner Identifiers.

Note that :Provider Person and Practitioner are used interchangeably in this document, as Practitioner is the name of the FHIR resource used to represent a Provider Person. When used in the context of FHIR, Practitioner will be used in place of Provider Person.

Scope

This transaction involves a request by the following Identifiers for:

Practitioner:

Source Identifier
College URI License Number
Unique Provider Identifier URI UPI

A valid search must have a source and identifier. All searches, by identifier, against PPR must be qualified with the Issuer code. Issuers are identified by the appropriate URI value. Identifiers are sequential/random numeric values issued by each source. As such, there may be overlap of identifier values across sources.

An FHIR RESTful client sends the search by identified types of Practitioner identifiers; the request is received by the FHIR Practitioner RESTful Server which returns the requested resource. This transaction requires the use and knowledge of specific types of identifiers.

Any Practitioner Definitional Identifier may be used with this interaction; a Definitional identifier is one that is a Unique Identifier assigned by a source of information to the PPR. This type of identifier includes a Ministry of Health assigned Stakeholder number, License number issued by a Regulatory college, or a UPI (Unique Provider Identifier) as assigned by the former Legacy Provider Registry and ported to PPR. In any case, the search identifier parameter must be specified along with the correct URI value assigned to the identifier issuer.

The client must provide the correct value of the identifiers as specified above, either from the Practitioner EHR record, public record or from the result of another FHIR transaction (e.g. Practitioner/Location Match). For example, a Pharmacist may use the search operation to retrieve the Prescriber (Practitioner) information from the registry using Practitioner’s UPI from Practitioner’s EHR record, or the Practitioner’s regulatory college issued license number.

In addition the searching by identifier, this operation also supports search using the following search criteria:

Query Search Parameters Type Description Usage Note
active
(Practitioner.active)		 token whether practitioner is active or not Accepted values are true or false
name
(Practitioner.name)		 string A (part of the) practitioner name
address
Location.address		 string A (part of the) address of the practitioner
gender
(Practitioner.gender)		 token The practitioner's gender
communication
(Practitioner.communication)		 token The communication language available for this practitioner

Interaction Diagrams

The following diagram illustrates the high level interaction between a FHIR Client and FHIR Provider RESTful Server. In this implementation guide, Provincial Provider Registry is playing the role of the FHIR Provider RESTful Server. All subsequent references of this actor (FHIR Provider RESTful server) should be interpreted as the Provincial Provider Registry.

The Provider FHIR transaction will use the following query and responses:

• Practitioner Search Request/Practitioner Search Response

The resource cannot be rendered.

Actor: FHIR Provider RESTful Client

Role: Requestor

Requests a detailed profile of a single practitioner based on a known Practitioner ID Issuer from the FHIR Provider RESTful Server. The FHIR Client uses the information received from the FHIR Provider RESTful Server for its own purposes. The RESTful client is referred to as the “FHIR client” in the remainder of the document.

Actor: FHIR Provider RESTful Server

Role: Information Service

Returns a bundle containing the demographic information for the single practitioner corresponding to the Issuer & ID values specified by the FHIR Provider RESTful Client. This actor is referred to as the FHIR server in the remainder of the document.

Specification

This FHIR Provider specification is based on the HL7 R4 Search operation. It makes use of the following resources:

Note: Please note that Practitioner response is referenced in PractitionerRole response

Practitioner Search Request

The practitioner Search Request is an HTTP POST operation(Alternatively, clients can also send GET based search ) with exactly one query parameter specified below. The syntax of the request is always

POST [base]/Practitioner/_search?identifier=[system]|[value]

Or alternatively,

GET [base]/Practitioner?identifier=[system]|[value]

Note: For list of Identifiers ,see scope section above

Practitioner Search Response

General

The PPR FHIR profiles are developed to constrain value sets and cardinality of data elements in the resources listed above. Since FHIR R4 does not support all the data elements required for this project, we have introduced a few extensions which can be found here.

Search.Mode

The base FHIR specification states that while Search must return the requested resource type, HealthcareService, the server may also choose to return additional relevant resources. In the case of PHSD, the server will also return the Practitioner, PractitonerRole, Location, and Organization resources that are associated to the PRactitioner search results.

The element Bundle.entry[x].search.mode will be used to distinguish between which resources are being returned as a direct result of the search (value="match") vs inclusion for relevance (value="include"). Similarly, this may also be used to indicate OperationOutcome resources that were included (value="outcome").

Extensions

Summary of Supported Operations

The table below shows the allowed transactions for each profile and how they support FHIR endpoints, resources and their corresponding HTTP operations:

Resource Transaction HTTP Operations URL Request Body Resource Response Body Resource
Practitioner Search POST [base]/Practitioner/_search? N/A Bundle containing Practitioner, PractitionerRole, Location

Alternatively, clients can also send GET based search as follows:

Resource Transaction HTTP Operations URL Request Body Resource Response Body Resource
Practitioner Search GET [base]/Practitioner? N/A Bundle containing Practitioner, PractitionerRole, Location

The interaction summary table below lists the HTTP status codes that may be returned for the search.

Interaction Content-Type Body Location Versioning Status Codes Comments
Search (practitioner) R R: Bundle N/A N/A 200,400,401,403,404,406,422,500,503,504

Practitioner Search Operations

The Practitioner search is invoked through a HTTP POST (alternatively GET) request specifying the issuer (e.g. URI of PPR EPID, CPSO etc.) and identifier value (EPID, UPI, etc.) of a single Practitioner instance. The response from the FHIR Provider RESTful Server will be a Practitioner Resource, or in the case of a failed search, an operation outcome resource.

Trigger Event

When a FHIR Client has the identifiers for an practitioner but does not yet have the name, contact, license and other information or wishes to retrieve an updated version of the practitioner’s information, it invokes an Practitioner search.

Expected Behavior

See Response Handling page for additional response handling behaviour.

Legend
code = OperationOutcome.issue.code
severity = OperationOutcome.issue.severity
details.coding.code=OperationOutcome.issue.details.coding.code
details.coding.display=OperationOutcome.issue.details.coding.display
details.text = OperationOutcome.issue.details.coding.text


HTTP Status Scenario Description severity code details.coding.code details.coding.display details.text
200 OK At least one Practitioner resource matching the specified search criteria is found HTTP 200 OK. Returns a search result Bundle containing Practitioner resources that match the search criteria.
200 OK No Practitioner resources matching the specified search criteria are found. Returns an search result Bundle with zero search results. Also returns an OperationOutcome resource with a warning indicating no summaries were found. warning not-found
400 Bad Request Missing security token error required Missing required security token: PIN
400 Bad Request POST operation contains incorrect header value for "Content-Type" - should be "application/fhir+json" error invalid
400 Bad Request When there was syntactical error such as a missing or invalid header, a missing or invalid URL parameter, a request body that can't be parsed or doesn't conform to the basic FHIR JSON/XML syntax rules, etc. Returns an OperationOutcome resource indicating an issue. The client must fix the request and try again. error invalid Will vary depending on the error
401 Unauthorized Failed authentication error security Authorization is required for the interaction that was attempted
406 Not Acceptable The Accept header requested a format that the server does not support error not-supported
422 Unprocessible Entity FHIR validation errors such as invalid code, wrong date format, or violation of LOB defined business rules Will vary depending on the error Will vary depending on the error OH-defined error code OH-defined errror message
429 Too Many Requests Rate Limit error throttled Too Many Requests
500 Internal Server Error PHSD API validates the request but cannot return a valid response due to internal issues. fatal exception Internal Error
503 Service Unavailable Indicates that the services has been temporarily taken down (on purpose)
504 Gateway Timeout Downstream system(s) did not return timely response error timeout

Examples

Practitioner search request:

The search request can be either a GET or POST

POST [base]/Practitioner/_search?identifier=[system]|[value]

Or alternatively,

GET [base]/practitioner?identifier=[system]|[value]

Examples of a povider person search Request can be found below

POST [base]/Practitioner/_search?identifier=https://fhir.infoway-inforoute.ca/NamingSystem/ca-on-license-physician|12324566

Or alternatively,

GET [base]/Practitioner?identifier= https://fhir.infoway-inforoute.ca/NamingSystem/ca-on-provider-upi|3456789023


GET [base]/Practitioner?identifier=https://fhir.infoway-inforoute.ca/NamingSystem/ca-on-license-physician|12324566


Examples of a provider person search response can be found below

Example of Operation Outcome