Hello Matthew
From my view implementing FHIR ability to OpenEMR in PHP from scratch will be a laborious task. Also, the gain may not be proportional to the effort as there are platforms that can be leveraged for this task. So not to reinvent the wheel, ViSolve customized HAPI FHIR to work with OpenEMR database.
To Implement FHIR from scratch in PHP, we see some challenges like:
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FHIR has 93 resources, each resource has its own definition and parameters that need to analyzed and implemented based on the standard
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Implementing FHIR standard in PHP from scratch - required to change the OpenEMR existing features to support the implementation
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Need to convert to JSON / XML format according to the required standard & definition
HAPI is a opensource FHIR API - it has the resources schema classes defined and functions to convert into JSON/XML. We have used those to do CRUD operations with OpenEMR database. It is noteworthy, to mention that HAPI has contributed significantly to the HL7 standard.
As a POC project, ViSolve has already implemented some of the basic primary resources with OpenEMR database to give the FHIR server ability to OpenEMR.
ViSolve has tested the OpenEMR FHIR enabled server with postman application and we have focused on all the operations like:
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Read the particular entry of resource (given ID) -
Create a new entry in the resource -
Update the entry in the resource (given ID) -
Delete the entry in the resource (given ID) -
Full Search of a resource (will retrieve all the values in a Resource)
Thanks & Regards,
Tech Lead - Solutions & Services
ViSolve Inc