FHIR Connector Specification

Introduction

In Simplifier we have a lot of profiles and other conformance resources that are very valuable to be used in tools from other people and companies, like validators, resource editors, rendering tools, code generation, and much more.

Allthough it is possible for users to retrieve data from Simplifier by downloading, and uploading it to one of these tools, that process is cumbersome, slow and in some cases repetivite. There are also cases where the tool requires more, like discovering dependencies and then also requiring those dependencies.

We also realised there are a lot of other places on the internet, that either have FHIR data or have a way to work with FHIR data. For these scenario's we have defined this connector specification. It allows tools to start communicating to eachother with a minimal set of standardized parameters.

We choose to use callback parameters, because it is much more lightweight to just provide a link to another website, than it would be for the originating site to send the actual resource to the target site. There is a lot more that could go wrong. It would have to deal with authorization would have much less clear feedback to the user.

That is the reason we defined this standard to share with the rest of the FHIR community and implemented it in Simplifier.