FHIR Chat · No. of pages in DocumentReference

Stream: fhir/documents

Topic: No. of pages in DocumentReference

Simone Heckmann (Sep 12 2018 at 07:35):

Hi all,
I just came across a requirement, that we want to know the number of pages a document has when looking at the metadata (DocumentReference.content).
I'm thinking that this might be a candidate to make it a core extension...
Opinions?

Grahame Grieve (Sep 12 2018 at 08:26):

what's the use case?

Simone Heckmann (Sep 12 2018 at 11:18):

For us, mostly statistics. We're looking at metadata of scanned documents and want to figure out who the worst offernders are in terms of still producing paper :)
Filesize isn't a good measure, because it depends on resolution and b/w vs. colour

Simone Heckmann (Sep 12 2018 at 11:20):

But I think it's convenient for documentreference consumers to have a rough idea whether a document has 10 or 100 pages, before requesting the binary.
No. of pages is more human readable than filesize.

Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 12 2018 at 14:31):

You could define an extension for it on Attachment, but I can't see it being added as a core element.

Simone Heckmann (Sep 12 2018 at 14:33):

No definitely not a core element, but I was thinking "core-extension". It feels wrong to put a common concept like "number of pages" into a system-specific extension. Not national extension either...

Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 12 2018 at 14:35):

Core extension is fine. Submit a change proposal :)

John Moehrke (Sep 12 2018 at 15:07):

Most documents are not page oriented (e.g. FHIR documents, CDA, DICOM, text (blue-button), propitary, etc). Only a few types (PDF) have any concept of pages. Even page count is dependent on the page size (USA-Letter, vs A4, vs something else). I can just imagine someone indicating one page on A0.