This is our FHIR Implementation Guide. It contains the specifications developed by our community.

This publication contains the specifications that can be reused in other implementation guides and are clinical in nature. This IG is structured in the following content sections:

Background: Information about the specifications, or what you should know to be able to best navigate and use these specifications. Contains a general introduction to the publication structure and content, the artefact types, common privacy and security specifications and the official HL7 FHIR release that this specification is based upon.

Functional Description: Functional content, more relevant for business or functional analysts, as well as health professionals. Contains the context around these specifications (relevant projects, legal and implementation aspects), the interoperability actors and transactions, and especially the use cases that have been considered in the specification and the logical data models – the functional (i.e. non-technical) data sets that are used in data exchange.

Detailed Specifications: The actual technical specifications – the FHIR conformance resources that are defined in this specification – profiles, data types, capability statements. This is targeted at (technical) implementers.

Terminology: The vocabulary resources – Naming Systems, Code Systems and Value Sets, which support semantic interoperability. These resources define the use of standard terminologies (e.g. LOINC, SNOMED-CT) or internal codes for Belgium, e.g. official codes for Civil Status).

This publication contains the full set of specifications...

There is also an overview of the projects and motivation for the specifications.

The top menu allows quick navigation to the different sections, and a Table of Contents is provided with the entire content of this Implementation Guide. (Be aware that some pages have multiple tabs).

Intellectual Property Considerations

While this implementation guide and the underlying FHIR are licensed as public domain, this guide includes examples making use of terminologies such as LOINC, SNOMED CT and others which have more restrictive licensing requirements. Implementers should make themselves familiar with licensing and any other constraints of terminologies, questionnaires, and other components used as part of their implementation process. In some cases, licensing requirements may limit the systems that data captured using certain questionnaires may be shared with.