The New FHIR Package Registry
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SubscribeAs the number of stable FHIR specifications grows, it has become more and more important to find FHIR resources of interest within this volume of data. To make this possible we have developed, with our US partner company Vermonster, the new FHIR Registry for HL7 International.
Those who are building a new specification need to know they can save time and avoid reinventing the wheel, by using readily available prior art. Those who are implementing a FHIR specification need to quickly and with certainty find the set of resources they need to conform to. With the powerful, Elastic-based search in the Registry, all can simply type a term of their interest and easily find stable, coherent FHIR specifications which address the topic.
The FHIR Registry is built on the infrastructure of Firely’s FHIR collaboration platform Simplifier.net and is serving all published FHIR Packages in the world. Already back in 2017 our CTO Ewout Kramer realized that we needed FHIR Packages to publish stable, versioned sets of FHIR resources. In 2018 we built the first version of the FHIR Package server in Simplifier.net. As we were on the forefront of this revolution, Simplifier.net is now the perfect place to create, document and publish your FHIR packages.
There’s more information available on what FHIR packages are and how to publish to the FHIR Package Registry, which you can find on the Registry itself.
Computers can browse the FHIR Package registry via the API endpoint. For everyone else there’s an overview of how to use the FHIR Registry in the section below.
Search
Anyone can easily find the latest stable publication of any FHIR regulation they need to comply with, like the UK Core FHIR profiles for the United Kingdom, the MedMij standard for the Netherlands or Carin Blue Button for the United States.
Similarly, you can browse published data and API definitions on a topic of your interest like Genomics, Dental Care, Pharmacy or COVID-19.
From there, we can drill down further by limiting our search results to a specific FHIR version or only resource hits of a specific FHIR resource. Building on our last example, we can quickly find all ValueSets on COVID-19, that have been released for FHIR R4.
On the other hand, we can also broaden our search. By default, the registry only searches in the latest stable releases of packages. That means: no pre-release packages (e.g. version 1.2.3-beta) and from those versions only the latest one. If you’re interested in older versions as well, feel free to uncheck that filter. For example, when you want to find a resource from the US Core STU3 release (their latest version is on FHIR R4).
Package overview
When you find a FHIR package of interest in the results, click through to get a full overview. It will list all the available package meta data, such as the full description, release notes and license. It will also point out other versions of this package and the implementation guide describing it.
Every package will show a link to view more details on Simplifier.net. This will provide additional options, like downloading the package or finding the corresponding Simplifier development project.
If you want to use this package on your computer (for instance, in the Forge FHIR profile editor or the IG Publisher), the commands to install it with NPM or our Command Line Tool for FHIR Firely Terminal are directly available. More on that here.
Beyond the Summary tab, the Dependencies tab will give you links to the FHIR standards the current package builds on.
Contents: FHIR Resources
The Contents tab is showing all resources contained within the FHIR package with their canonicals. Wondering what a resource looks like? Just click it and we’ll show you the rendering, XML and JSON on Simplifier.net.
Since this can be a lengthy list, there is a filter available to limit it to the resources you want. For example, to find the COVID resources in the FHIR terminology support package.
Get started now
We hope the new FHIR Registry can be a great homepage for implementers and modelers coming into FHIR to find their starting points. The FHIR Registry is available at https://registry.fhir.org.
3 thoughts
impactful
is there a way to find “all IGs that profile the X resource”?
Use-case is, I know that I want to use the CarePlan resource, but don’t know if someone else has already done the profiling that I think I need to do.
Hi John,
A preliminary version of that is available by using the Resource Filter on the bottom left: https://registry.fhir.org/results?latestFilter=true&resourceFilter=%5B%22CarePlan%22%5D&fhirVersionFilter=%5B%22R4%22%5D (Note CarePlan is selected).
However, that currently does not return all packages you would expect, which is captured as an issue on the HL7 Jira Registry board.
We are also working on providing a bit more advanced search on Simplifier.net (which is also the backbone behind the Registry), with a query like this: https://simplifier.net/search-beta?Resource=StructureDefinition&Entity=PackageFile&FHIR=STU3&FHIR=R4&Term=careplan.
But that too isn’t perfect yet and will be taken on in the coming period.
Hope that helps (for the future).
Best,
Ward