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 guide provides additional 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.
  • Visit our Training page which provides links to documentation, presentations and videos on FHIR.

Guide Contents

This guide contains the following:

  • Contents: To which a set of logical statements that implementations must confirm. 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 describes 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 Structure

The table below gives guidance about the structure of the guide and an indication of the purpose and intended audience of each of 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 information 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.
Guidance An Overview of the relationship between the resources within the guide.
Administrative Data Overview of the administrative profiles and examples of how they can be used
Allergy Overview of the allergy profiles and examples of how they can be used
Diagnostic Reports Overview of the diagnostic report profiles and examples of how they can be used
Medications Overview of the medication profiles and examples of how they can be used
Sensitive Data Overview of how sensitive data can be treated in FHIR profiles
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 mapping details 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.
Supplemental Metadata Information on how reference data should be used with FHIR resources
UK Core Access Information on UK Core Access which outlines standardised methods for accessing clinical data in a FHIR store
Help and Support Provides help and support information
Change Notices A summary of the Change Notices used within this Guide. Relationships exist between the Wales FHIR Implementation Guide and Change Notices, either because a Change Notice mandates the use of specific Profiles within the Guide or because the Guide uses Value Sets that are included within existing Change Notices.
Version Control and Ballot Process Statement Release Strategy for this guide.
Glossary A list of terms used throughout this guide and their meaning
Help and Support This page provides contact details and a link to log issues against this guide and to track progress of existing logged issues.
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.
Version History Provides a version history and links to other versions of this guide.
Licensing Details on the licensed products used within this guide
Deployment Details on how project packages can be used
Related Pages A list of websites that are used by NHS Wales to develop FHIR profiles