CH EKM (R4)
0.0.1 - ci-build Switzerland flag

CH EKM (R4), published by Federal Office of Public Health FOPH. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.0.1 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/ahdis/ch-ekm/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

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Official URL: http://fhir.ch/ig/ch-ekm/ImplementationGuide/ch.fhir.ig.ch-ekm Version: 0.0.1
Draft as of 2026-01-27 Computable Name: CH_EKM

Copyright/Legal: CC0-1.0

Introduction

CH EKM (Elektronische klinische Meldung) is a project of the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), Communicable Diseases Division, to enable clinicians to send their clinical findings of communicable infectious diseases to the FOPH electronically. A report is created as a specialized Clinical Document based on the HL7® FHIR® standard.

This FHIR document is sent to the FOPH electronically. CH EKM derives from the Swiss implementation guides.

The specification herewith documented is work in progress. No liability can be inferred from the use or misuse of this specification, or its consequences.

Download: You can download this implementation guide in npm format from here.

Implementation Support for Clinical Information Systems.

This guide supports you as a clinical information system in the following way:

  • Value sets for the terminology are provided as FHIR resources which you can directly import from the npm package.

  • Further documentation for specific topics can be found on guidance and/or by contacting the FOPH directly.

FHIR R4 has a huge implementation community and offers various libraries to support the implementation of FHIR based solutions, for creating the FHIR document or providing a client for doing the FHIR API calls. For java we recommend hapi-fhir, for .NET firely-net-sdk, but there are also multiple other options. If you have questions about general FHIR questions do not hesitate to ask in chat.fhir.org.

To check if your report is valid to the requirements of this implementation guide you can check it with the FHIR Validator providing this package as a parameter and specifying the profile http://fhir.ch/ig/ch-ekm/StructureDefinition/profile-id.

Since the FHIR API is standardized you can test your client also against a public FHIR test server like hapi.

If you have general feedback this implementation guide you find at the bottom a "Propose a change" link where you can raise an issue.

Must Support

For the CH EKM exchange format, the mustSupport flag set to true has the following meaning:
If the sending application has data for the element, it is required to populate the element with a non-empty value. If the value is not known, the element may be omitted.

IP Statements

HL7®, HEALTH LEVEL SEVEN®, FHIR® and the FHIR ® are trademarks owned by Health Level Seven International, registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

This publication includes IP covered under the following statements.

Cross Version Analysis

This is an R4 IG. None of the features it uses are changed in R4B, so it can be used as is with R4B systems. Packages for both R4 (ch.fhir.ig.ch-ekm.r4) and R4B (ch.fhir.ig.ch-ekm.r4b) are available.

Dependencies

Dependency Overview

Dependency Table

Globals Table

There are no Global profiles defined