How to Publish Your Profile – within One Hour

After completing your FHIR profiles, the next step will be to make them available to the world. Publishing your profiles will enable, for instance, app developers to build on your work. It may even be possible that your published profiles become the cornerstone of nationwide IT infrastructure for decades!

Assuming you have used Forge to author your profiles, it will be very easy to publish your work thanks to the integration of Forge with Simplifier. Besides Simplifier, Forge is able to publish to any FHIR server with the click of a button. In this post, we will however elaborate on publishing profiles to Simplifier. Simplifier is a registry for all FHIR resources. It facilitates the use of FHIR because of the ability to search and use previous work. Moreover, Simplifier can be used as a platform to work on your profiles with multiple developers. I will come back to this shortly. Let me first show you how to publish your profile in two steps!

Forge: Upload to Simplifier

After finishing your profile in Forge, go to ‘File’ at the top menu and click ‘Publish to Simplifier.net’ (or press Ctrl + U instead). In the following screen, you will be asked to give your Simplifier.net credentials. In case you do not have a Simplifier account yet, please register here. Create a project by going to your personal portal, the tab ‘your projects’, and click the button ‘create a new project’. After you provided your credentials, click ‘Connect’ and wait a second until the Status says ‘Passed’. Now, you can select the project in which you want to publish your profile. Click the save button to finish the upload.

Simplifier: Publish

Forge returns to its editor screen and your profile is now online in Simplifier. If your profile is truly ready for the world, you can publish it in Simplifier. The next step will be to find your recent uploaded profile in your project in Simplifier. Go to your personal portal in Simplifier and select the project under ‘Your Projects’. Click on your uploaded profile which can be found under the tab ‘Resources’. On your profile page, click the ‘Publish’ button at the top right beneath your username. That’s it! Your profile is online and marked as published in Simplifier.

Finally

I promised to further discuss the use of Simplifier as a platform to work on your profiles with different users/developers. One of the reasons this works is the integration of Forge and Simplifier. Imagine that you would like to get feedback on your designed FHIR profiles. To arrange this, just upload the profiles to Simplifier and provide the desired users with the project name or link to your project. In this way, you show them the rendered profiles in a coherent way and provide them with the ability to download the profiles in XML or JSON format. Members of the same project, assuming they have the necessary user rights, can easily update the profiles by importing them into Forge and upload them again as described above. Thereby making FHIR even simpler!

If you have any questions, feel free to comment or contact us at simplifier@fire.ly.