I am learning about building a SMART app on FHIR for accessing EHR. I was going through the available documentation and reading material but there's one thing which I am not clear about.
Is there a way that I can access the existing patient's data i.e. I skip the part where I create and upload the FHIR data/resource and just validate and utilize the existing data?
Are there any services, that are available for that?
Many around the industry host FHIR servers as "sandbox" environments so you don't have to spin up an Azure server and load it with resources.
SMART hosts a sandbox at https://launch.smarthealthit.org with sample patients - and can do the SMART OAuth functionality as well.
The SMART landing page lists several EHR vendor sandboxes which will give you a mix of testing tools - some can get you all the way to working SMART on FHIR app with fake patients.
There are also many sandboxes that don't have SMART on FHIR in front of them -
SMART accesses information over a FHIR interface - so the desired data must be exposed in a manner compliant with the FHIR's requirements for a RESTful search call. That doesn't mean the data must be stored as FHIR or must be moved to a FHIR server. Lots of systems with non-FHIR-based data stores are capable of providing access to that data over a FHIR interface. However, you'll have to build that interface. There are third-party tools that can help you build the interface, but given that each legacy system stores data differently, there's nothing that would do it 'automatically' without manual mapping effort.
