Retrospective updates

Question

We are planning to use the "history" interaction to support viewing of historical snapshots of a resource (for example, viewing care event details for an encounter as historical snapshots of the encounter)

For example,

GET encounter/{id}/_history/{vid}

We wanted to use the same structure to perform retrospective updates to a particular history entry using a PUT interaction

PUT encounter/{id}/_history/{vid}

However, there seems to be a restriction in doing so as mentioned here

Accordingly, there is no way to update or delete past versions of the record, except that the metadata can be modified (mainly for access control purposes)

Is there any other mechanism for performing retrospective updates?

Answer 1

There is no mechanism to adjust history. History does not represent "the history of what occurred". It represents "the set of versions that existed on this server at a particular period of time". As such, short of time travel, there's no meaningful need to change history records. If you wanted to assert multiple separate things about a resource at different times, you could create multiple instances and link them together using Linkage - e.g. A Condition that had one severity for a year, then escalated for 2 years, then went into remission for a year, then came back, then got resolved could be represented using multiple Condition records each with different effective periods. Linkage could be used to indicate that they were all talking about the same Condition. And all could be created "now" as the time when the server first became aware of that historical information.