Stream: terminology
Topic: Concepts etc. as Resources
Lin Zhang (Apr 04 2021 at 16:08):
How about treating Concepts, Terms and Relationships as stand-a-lone FHIR Resources?
Lin Zhang (Apr 04 2021 at 16:33):
Just like the method 2 summarized in Technical Overview of the specification for catalogs (see https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-order-catalog/index.html#scopes-of-order-catalogs-and-roles-involved), it would make the life easier than the method 1 in which a larger size would hamper the management (creation, update, query, retrieval) of the resource CodeSystem.
Lin Zhang (Apr 04 2021 at 16:40):
That might also be why we need/have some separate tool(s) to do the management such as loading a CodeSystem and there are still challenges.
Lloyd McKenzie (Apr 05 2021 at 15:27):
There's been discussion about this in the past but hasn't been a whole lot of implementer interest
Lin Zhang (Apr 05 2021 at 23:34):
@Lloyd McKenzie Thanks
Jose Costa Teixeira (Apr 06 2021 at 14:52):
I have interest in treating Concepts / Terms as standalone resources. The information I saw was that we'd use CodeSystem to express vocabulary terms, but that is a challenge (for proper lifecycle management, we'd have a CodeSystem with one concept only, which is weird)
Jose Costa Teixeira (Apr 06 2021 at 14:54):
The management and interoperability of Concepts is important for some implementation guidance
Jose Costa Teixeira (Apr 06 2021 at 14:54):
so, +1 on this need
Rob Hausam (Apr 06 2021 at 16:59):
I think this was (and probably still is) considered to be primarily useful in the terminology development space, rather than for terminology use. Initially FHIR purposefully stayed away from the terminology development space. Potentially that could be something to bring up for consideration again.
Lin Zhang (Apr 06 2021 at 23:36):
Supports for a terminology IDE/collaborative platform are a complex set of requirements and they would be out of the scope of FHIR TS spec. But a basic/minimum set of funtions are necessory for terminology management such as periodic updates.
Lloyd McKenzie (Apr 07 2021 at 01:00):
Periodic updates are handled relatively well using PATCH (which is significantly lighter weight than treating each concept as a resource instance)
Rob Hausam (Apr 07 2021 at 01:03):
For many code systems you probably don't need PATCH. I haven't used PATCH yet, and I've done quite a few terminology updates. But being able to support incremental updates rather than a complete replace certainly can have significant advantages.
Michael Lawley (Apr 07 2021 at 01:36):
Indeed, adding a Concept (using the JSON Patch option) is as simple as PATCH with something like:
[{
"op": "add",
"path": "/concept/-",
"value": {
"code": "B",
"display": "My fancy new concept"
}
}]
Lin Zhang (Apr 07 2021 at 05:47):
@Lloyd McKenzie @Rob Hausam @Michael Lawley Thanks a lot. I'll check out how to do PATCH.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
