FHIR Chat · Resource comparisons

Stream: implementers

Topic: Resource comparisons

Mark Gill (May 16 2016 at 00:49):

Suppose you have two FHIR responses, of say allergies, and you wish to compare them to see the differences. Does anyone know if any open-source tools which may help?

Grahame Grieve (May 16 2016 at 00:50):

I usually save them to json or xml using pretty print, and then use a text editor to compare them

Mark Gill (May 16 2016 at 00:50):

For example I want to know if an allergy in resource 1 exists in resource 2, even if it is coded differently?

Grahame Grieve (May 16 2016 at 00:50):

but there are specific xml compar tools

Grahame Grieve (May 16 2016 at 00:50):

phoooar - I've never heard of anything like that

Mark Gill (May 16 2016 at 00:51):

I thought that might be the case!

Mark Gill (May 16 2016 at 00:53):

If the codings were the same then a simple comparison should be possible, as you say by json/xml

Peter Bernhardt (May 16 2016 at 16:32):

@Mark Gill this is a data curation problem more than anything, isn't it? REST and HTTP (think last modified and ETag headers) will take you pretty far if you have a pure FHIR interface (but who has that in a real-world production system?). I've found the bigger challenge is when you have a system that aggregates data from heterogenous data sources (e.g., v2 or CDA).

Mark Gill (May 16 2016 at 21:00):

Thanks @Peter Bernhardt. I'm looking at comparing data from two different sources and seeing what from set A is/isn't in set B.
I was hoping there would be some coding system mapper I could use but (say pass in a coding from system A and the system from system B then output an equivalent coding from system B) to no avail so far!