Profile Design

The HL7 FHIR® standard

The HL7 FHIR® standard creates a common foundation on which a variety of different solutions are implemented. The resources contained in the specification usually require further adaptation to particular health or social care use cases; this adaptation is referred to as "profiling" and the resulting artefacts as "profiles".

General profiling approach

The checklist below was adhered to when developing a draft UK Core profile suitable for progression to Clinical and Technical Assurance.

• Use any corresponding CareConnect profile as a starting point For each profile, where a CareConnect STU3 profile exists, refer to it as a starting point for the UK Core FHIR R4 profiling exercise
• Consider the resource changes between FHIR STU3 and R4 versions Analyse the changes in the FHIR standard between FHIR STU3 version and FHIR R4,for example the addition or deletion of any elements and the introduction of new or updated terminology assets in the R4 version.

Approach to StructureDefinition elements

• Identifiers - Where existing CareConnect STU3 profiles have applied slicing and profiling to identifiers, this will be recreated in the UK Core profiles, then evaluated during Clinical and Technical assurance.
• Removal of elements - No elements will be removed from the FHIR assets for the UK Core profiles during initial profiling prior to Clinical and Technical Assurance.
• Experimental element - The FHIR specification defines the 'StructureDefinition.experimental' element as the following, when set to ‘true’: 'This structure was authored for testing purposes (or education/evaluation/marketing), and is not intended for genuine usage.' (Source: http://hl7.org/fhir/r4/structuredefinition.html). Currently there is no requirement in the UK Core to set the experimental element as ‘true’ or ‘false’, so this field should remain in the default view (undefined).

Naming convention for profiles

The UK Core profile name SHALL follow an agreed format. The name of a profile consists of a number of name segments, and will be in the form:-

[Base][FHIRAssetName][Specialism]

The segments are defined as follows:-

• Base: (Mandatory) - The base for a profile this will always be UKCore.
• FHIRAssetName: (Mandatory) - The name of the base FHIR Resource.
• Specialism: (Required) - This is only used where there are multiple UK Core profiles for a given base resource type.

Note: "Mandatory" means that a segment SHALL be present. "Required" means that a segment SHOULD be present, in this case in the event of there being multiple profiles for one base resource.

The physical file name SHALL be in the format [Base]-[FHIRAssetName][Specialism] and SHALL be created in the file XML format.

Metadata usage

The list below contains the element differences between the UKcore and HL7.

    <identifier>
        <system value="urn:ietf:rfc:3986"/>
        <value value="urn:oid:2.16.840.1.113883.2.1.3.2.4.16.21"/>
    </identifier>

Further information about resource is available.

Example of a Profile