Stream: social
Topic: Is this a valid phrase for "civilians"?
Dave deBronkart (Nov 08 2019 at 16:03):
In an off-stage interview at Exponential Medicine this week, this speaker used an interesting phrase here. I know it's an extreme simplification, but to me as someone with only the thinnest technical knowledge, this seems valid, given what people here said at the start of the "trivial tutorial" thread. Is this at all valid, as far as it goes?
"One way to think about FHIR is that every piece of data in the EMR has its own web address."
IOW, since data is requested using what is basically (or literally?) a URL, is that analogy reasonably useful?
I'm asking because part of the patient empowerment group's work will be to begin raising public awareness, and the public very much doesn't need deeply precise answers, they need directionally reasonable ways of understanding what's going on.
Lloyd McKenzie (Nov 08 2019 at 16:16):
Yes, that's generally accurate, at least when talking about FHIR REST interfaces, which is the majority of implementations. The granularity of access isn't down to the level of a single address or phone number - you get all demographics at one location, all details of a single lab result at another. But every record does have a single generally reliable URL
David Hay (Nov 08 2019 at 17:32):
I rather like that analogy...
Peter Jordan (Nov 08 2019 at 20:02):
Nice phrase. It might be even better if we could say "secure, web address".
Dave deBronkart (Nov 09 2019 at 17:41):
Hair-splitting time: Is "web address" an analogy, or does a RESTful API literally take URLs coming in? And is it correct to say that a URL starting with http:// is a web address, or not necessarily?
I don't have a technical need to be precisely right, but when I use a simplifying analogy, I like to know where I'm bending things...
Lloyd McKenzie (Nov 09 2019 at 19:06):
It's a literal thing. https://someserverurl/whatever/something/Patient/375 will give you the patient demographics for the patient that happens to have an internal database id of 375 on that server. URLs can be things other than "http", however with FHIR REST, they'll always be either http: or more commonly https: (the latter being the security protected access point)
Dave deBronkart (Nov 09 2019 at 20:14):
So, to help me be clear: https://someserverurl/whatever/something/Patient/375 can legitimately be called a Web address, yes?
(I think so - just being careful.)
Grahame Grieve (Nov 09 2019 at 20:20):
yes it can called that (in fact, it is a web address)
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
