FHIR R4 List Library

Overview

This asset is a component of MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare.

MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare enables healthcare providers to unlock critical patient data to build a patient 360 within Salesforce Health Cloud, faster and easier than ever before. The solution includes pre-built APIs, connectors, integration templates, and a prescriptive end-to-end reference architecture to bring patient demographics information and COVID-19 test results from any EHR into Health Cloud using HL7 V2 or FHIR standards.

The solution also provides a library of United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and FHIR R4 resources to help healthcare developers adhere to interoperability needs and jumpstart the development of healthcare digital transformation initiatives.

Use case covered

The List resource is a flat, possibly ordered collection of records. List resources are used in many places, including allergies, medications, alerts, family history, medical history, etc. List resources can be used to support patient-specific clinical lists as well as lists that manage workflows such as tracking patients, managing teaching cases, etc. Resources supported by the List resource can be homogeneous – consisting of only one type of resource (e.g. allergy lists) as well as heterogeneous – containing a variety of resources (e.g. a problem list including Conditions, AllergyIntolerances, recent Procedures, etc.).

Lists will typically include references to the resources that make up the list, however, in some cases, the details of the content of the list might be expressed in the narrative only; e.g. a text record of a family history. The List resource is only needed if there is a need to filter the set of resources by a mechanism that cannot be accomplished via a simple query; e.g. there is no need to have a list for all AllergyIntolerances that exist on a server for a given patient. However, List is an appropriate mechanism to provide a filtered list of the subset of AllergyIntolerances that are deemed to be "current". Lists are allowed to contain other Lists, to create a nested collection of Lists.

Querying a List of resources such as AllergyIntolerance, Condition or Medication-related resources is different than querying the resource-specific endpoint. For example, a List of AllergyIntolerance resources would represent a curated point-in-time snapshot of the patient's allergies and intolerances. On the other hand, querying the AllergyIntolerance endpoint would typically produce a larger set of records as it would both be non-curated (potentially containing duplicate or out-of-date records) and current - generated based on information as of "now" rather than the last time a human manually revised the List resource instance. Which mechanism is most appropriate for data retrieval will vary by use-case. In some cases, systems might not have an appropriate curated List to query.

Note that the presence of an item in a List resource SHALL NOT change the meaning of any information that would be understood by looking at the item outside the context of the List, because items may be accessed directly outside the List by RESTful means or after a document is processed. For example, a List with a code that means "refuted conditions" cannot have items that are Condition resources that do not have a verificationStatus of refuted.

This library is used by FHIR R4 List API.

More information about FHIR R4 List specification can be found here.