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We are trying to implement a FHIR Rest Server for our application. In our current data model (and thus live data) several FHIR resources are represented by multiple tables, e.g. what would all be Observations are stored in tables for vital values, laboratory values and diagnosis. Each table has an independent, auto-incrementing primary ID, so there are entries with the same ID in different tables. But for GET or DELETE calls to the FHIR server a unique ID is needed. What would be the most sensible way to handle this?

Searching didn't reveal an inherent way of doing this, so I'm considering these two options:

  • Add a prefix to all (or just the problematic) table IDs, e.g lab-123 and vit-123
  • Add a UUID to every table and use that as the logical identifier

Both have drawbacks: an ID parser is necessary for the first one and the second requires multiple database calls to identify the correct record.

Is there a FHIR way that allows to split a resource into several sub-resources, even in the Rest URL? Ideally I'd get something like GET server:port/Observation/laboratory/123

Sebastian Lütge
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Server systems will have all sorts of different divisions of data in terms of how data is stored internally. What FHIR does is provide an interface that tries to hide those variations. So Observation/laboratory/123 would be going against what we're trying to do - because every system would have different divisions and it would be very difficult to get interoperability happening.

Either of the options you've proposed could work. I have a slight leaning towards the first option because it doesn't involve changing your persistence layer and it's a relatively straight-forward transformation to convert between external/fhir and internal.

Lloyd McKenzie
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Is there a FHIR way that allows to split a resource into several sub-resources, even in the Rest URL? Ideally I'd get something like GET server:port/Observation/laboratory/123

What would this mean for search? So, what would /Obervation?code=xxx search through? Would that search labs, vitals etc combined, or would you just allow access on /Observation/laboratory?

If these are truly "silos", maybe you could use http://servername/lab/Observation (so swap the last two path parts), which suggests your server has multiple "endpoints" for the different observations. I think more clients will be able to handle that url than the url you suggested.

Best, still, I think is having one of your two other options, for which the first is indeed the easiest to implement.

Ewout Kramer
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