ePMA Implementation Guidance for FHIR STU3

This guidance is under active development by NHS Digital and content may be added or updated on a regular basis.
Please note: This guidance has been superseded by the Implementation guide for digitial medicines, which contains up-to-date information.

Design Overview

This section provides solution design guidance for the implementation of the medicines use cases using the FHIR standard.

There is not a one-size-fits-all solution for medicines interoperability. This guide describes the likely differences within implementations and how the FHIR standard can be used in each. Common adoption of specific parts of the FHIR standard will result in nationwide interoperability of medicines data, between clinical systems and/or between Integrated Care Systems / Shared Medication Records.

Likely Design Differences

The two likely differences within the overall architecture of any solution will be;

  • Which clinical systems act as FHIR servers or FHIR consumers.
  • The architecture of Integrated Care Systems / Shared Medication Records available within the region.

FHIR Servers and FHIR Consumers

See the Interactions page that explains how the RESTful operations of POST and GET will be used depending on which clinical system is acting as a FHIR server or a FHIR consumer.

Architecture of Integrated Care Systems / Shared Medication Records

See the Shared Medication Record Architectures page that explains three likely architectures of federated, persisted copy and hybrid for shared records.

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