How to use this Implementation Guide

Overview

This Implementation Guide defines interoperability standards for Health and Care organisations in Wales through the use of FHIR.

These standards are derived from the UK Core which defines an approach to interoperability using FHIR across the four UK nations. This this guide provides addition documentation to support and clarify the usage of FHIR in Wales.

Readers will require at least a basic level of knowledge about HL7 FHIR.

  • The formal specification of the standard is available here.
  • This video provides a useful introduction to FHIR.

Guide Contents

This guide contains the following:

  • Contents: A set of logical statements which implementations must conform to. These are almost always conformance resources. These are published in the FHIR Assets section.
  • Examples: Examples that illustrate the intent of the profiles defined in this guide.

Intended Audience

The table below decribes the intended audience for this implementation.

Audience Description
Clinical Someone who is reviewing the implementation guide from a clinical perspective, including clinical safety, clinical pathway and informatics; as a clinical professional involved in initial implementations or further roll-out approaches.
Business Someone who is reviewing the implementation guide from a business process perspective; as a business analyst looking into workflow and the impact on existing business processes.
Architect Someone who is reviewing the implementation guide from an architectural perspective; as a solution architect looking into how this implementation will fit in with existing systems and interfaces.
Information Someone who is reviewing the implementation guide from an information standards perspective; as an information specialist looking into how this implementation will fit with Wales data standards.
FHIR Someone who is reviewing the implementation guide from a standards perspective; as a person with FHIR knowledge involved in reviewing the implementation guide for compliancy with the FHIR standard or alignment with other FHIR implementations.
Developer Someone who is reviewing the implementation guide from a development perspective, the developer who will be coding or involved in the building of the API or system.
Other Someone looking into the contents of the implementation guide for any other reason, for example as part of their education or a research project. This type of audience is implied and not shown in the table below.

Implementation Guide Structrue

The table below gives guidance about the structure of the guide and an indication of the purpose and intended audience of each the sections within the guide. The intended audience is included to illustrate which type of reader the page is primarily aimed at and of course does not exclude other types of readers from reviewing and feeding back to the team producing the implementation guide.

Page Subpage(s) Description and purpose
Home This is the starting point for readers and should be the page that is used when a link is provided to this guide.
Introduction This section gives a brief overview of the information within the guide and how it is structured. It will also be used to provide additional guidance around particular areas of use, e.g. diagnostic reports, allergies, medicines etc.
How to use this Implementation Guide Gives guidance to help the reader understand the structure and purpose of the infomation held within this guide. Provides a generated sitemap to aid navigation of the guide's contents.
Profile Descriptions This section provides guidance to help explain the various views, sections and notations that are used to describe the FHIR profiles contained in this guide.
Release Notes Gives the change history and any additional information to help the reader understand the changes to the guide. The latest changes will be added to the top of the page.
FHIR Assets This section contains the formal definitions for the FHIR assets defined within this guide.
Profiles and Extensions Provides the formal definition of the FHIR profiles and extensions defined within this guide. The Profile Descriptions section describes the views and notation provided here.
Terminology Provides the value sets and code systems defined in this guide. It also provides details mappings where these are required to map from an external value set to a Wales value set.
Naming Systems This page will contain the Naming Systems for this implementation guide.
Examples This section contains examples for each of the FHIR resources profiles in this guide. A logical overview and table view is provided, together with XML and JSON views to show the 'over the wire' format for each example.
Design This section provides design guidelines that explain the naming and other conventions used by the developers of this guide, and for future iterations of this guide.
Naming Conventions Provides naming convention guidance for the conformance resources used to define these standards.
Naming Systems Provides guidance for the creation of Naming System resources.
Help and Support Provides help and support information
Help and Support This page provides contact details and a link to log issues against this guidesm and to track progress of existing logged issues.
Version History Provides a version history and links to other versions of this guide.