Stream: united states
Topic: USCore for clinical notes
Hannah Sennik (Feb 23 2021 at 16:35):
I've generated synthetic USCore data using Synthea to look at DocumentReference and DiagnosticReport references. Is it possible to decode the attachments/do they actually contain meaningful text that would show up in a clinical note? I am trying to understand how the attachment of a clinical note may be exposed in a patient facing application
Michele Mottini (Feb 23 2021 at 16:39):
They are simply base64 encoded, so you can decode them. No idea if they contain something meaningful
Robert Scanlon (Feb 23 2021 at 17:36):
If you base64 decode them, you'll see text generated that follows this template, I believe.
Hannah Sennik (Feb 24 2021 at 13:35):
Thank you for your help, I was able to successfully decode! Is this representative of how clinical note attachments are typically stored? Are there cases where the attachments point to a pdf, and if so, what might the process be for pulling the pdf directly?
Robert Scanlon (Feb 24 2021 at 15:38):
While this data embedding method is allowed by US Core, I wouldn't assume it is the most common way this will be implemented by real systems providing a US Core compliant FHIR API. Synthea needs to embed all data within resources, since it isn't backed by a persistent service that can host documents. But if you are getting data from a FHIR Restful API, then it is by definition a persistent service, and doesn't have this same constraint. I imagine that many systems will just point you to another URL to download the file directly. And I would expect other document formats besides plain text will be popular (e.g. PDF), though I don't have data to back that expectation.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
