How to handle attachments
This section shows you how to handle attachments that may be sent with the FHIR payload.
Attachment types
The MIME type of the content being sent. It is expected that application/pdf will be the most common use case for this capability; however, a list of common health related MIME types has been provided below.
| Extension | Kind of document | MIME type |
|---|---|---|
.pdf |
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) | application/pdf |
.doc |
Microsoft Word | application/msword |
.docx |
Office Open XML Word extension | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
.rtf |
Rich-text format | application/mswrtford |
.html |
Hypertext Markup Language | text/html |
.txt |
Plain text | text/plain |
.xml |
Extensible Markup Language | text/xml |
.jpg / .jpeg |
JPEG images | image/jpg |
.png |
Portable Network Graphics | image/png |
.tiff |
Tag Image File Format | image/png |
Handling images
Images can be sent with this capability; however, care should be taken in relation to the subject and sensitivity of the image. Additional metadata (such as consent) may need to be provided.
Handling large attachments
Although MESH can handle very large files, it is possible that receiving systems are configured to reject attachments received over a certain size. In the event of this happening, an infastructure acknowledgement will be returned to the sender:
If the intended recipient is unable to receive this information, we recommend the sender provides additional metadata in the summary PDF regarding the attachments that are unable to be sent, such as the:
- file name
- file timestamp
- file size
This is so that the receiving GP practice can contact the sender of the payload for more information about the attachments, if required.