Extending the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) with Meta Resources

The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) from the international Health Language Seven (HL7) organization has been mandated by the United States Office of National Coordinator to promote the secure exchange of healthcare data for patients through the use of cloud-based APIs. FHIR reformulated the HL7 XML standard by defining 135+ resources that conceptualize the different aspects of healthcare data such as patients, practitioners, organizations, services, appointments, encounters, diagnostic data, and medications. Developers of healthcare applications select a subset of the resources that are required to solve their problems. However, the standard provides no way to effectively organize a subset of resources into a higher-level construct similar to software design patterns. This paper leverages the design pattern concept to extend the FHIR standard by defining meta resources that are a conceptual construct that clearly defines the involved resources and their interactions into one unified artifact. To illustrate the concepts of this paper, we use a mobile health application for medication reconciliation that integrates information from multiple electronic health records. We leverage FHIR extension mechanisms such as profiles and Bundle resources to integrate the meta resource into the resource contextualization layer of the FHIR standard.