FHIR

FHIR is a standard for health care data exchange. It is our intended standard for enrollment data, selected for its interoperability and clear specifications. Here is a brief intro to FHIR.

REDCap

Our goal with FHIR is to take a REDCap record from any project and transform it into a FHIR bundle as JSON.

FHIR Resources

A Resource is an entity that contains a set of structured data items described by the resource type definition. They can be represented in mutiple formats, including JSON.

See Level 3 and Level 4 of the stack in the FHIR R4 specs for information pertaining to FHIR Resources.

FHIR Bundles

A Bundle is a collection of Resources with context. Bundles are useful for returning a set of Resources matching a criteria or grouping a self-contained set of Resources to form a Document.

We plan to use a Bundle of type "collection" for REDCap records. A suitable alternative to a collection Bundle would be the Document format, which is a Bundle of type "document" that includes some other requirements and formalities we likely don't need.

The resources contained in the collection would at a minimum need to include a Specimen (including our barcode as an identifier) and one or more Observations. Additional information you might send about the participant or their encounter with your app could be included as a Patient and/or Encounter record.

Note that the "collection Bundle" means a set of things, not a collected specimen.

A collection Bundle would contain:

• 1+ Specimen(s) (including barcode)
• 1+ Observation(s)
• 1 Patient and/or 1+ Encounter(s)