Care Data Repository FHIR Implementation Guide - v0.0.3

Overview

The National Data Resource (NDR) is a programme led by Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW), funded by the Welsh Government. Our mission is to build a secure, unified national platform that brings together health and social care data from across Wales — enabling better decisions, better care, and better outcomes for the people of Wales.

The Care Data Repository (CDR) is the central hub within the NDR for Wales' health and care data, supporting clinical, operational, and research uses.

HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) are used to access data within the CDR - this implementation guide describes how to do so.

How this Guide is Structured

This is an implementation guide, a website intended to support you to access and use data stored in the NHS Wales CDR.

There are many ways of storing and presenting clinical data. The CDR has made architectural choices one way or another when there is a choice, and this guide explains those choices, and provides patterns for how you perform certain operations within that architecture.

For example, the CDR holds data about organisations that provide healthcare services. As a developer, I may want to create a service that queries the CDR to return currently active organisations that provide a specific service within a set post code.

To do so, begin by going to the Use Cases tab at the top of this page. The Organizations/Locations section describes in a narrative form some of the valid operations that can be performed on organisational data in the CDR. The Assets tab provides a Profile that describes all of the valid elements of an Organization as recorded in the CDR. Moving over to the Examples tab, you can see an example of what might be returned if you queried specific elements of Organization 7A5.

If you're new to the CDR or FHIR, the Introduction section includes an overview of the pages, additional context, and links to familiarise yourself with the approaches and vocabulary used here.

The use cases provided are commonly requested operations with standard approaches. Your implementation may well be much more complex. In that case, rather than trying to hack it together on your own, please reach out to FHIR.Standards@wales.nhs.uk and the FHIR Standards and Implementation Service will be happy to provide advice, support, and guidance.