Purpose

The pan-Canadian Patient Summary - FHIR Implementation Guide is an implementable, testable specification for the HL7 FHIR composition that defines the data payload of the PS-CA specification, based on the HL7® FHIR® IPS implementation guide. It contains information for solution developers to implement the PS-CA content data model using the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. It describes the data elements and types, cardinality, constraints, and code system references - all of the details needed for two systems to be semantically interoperable with each other when a PS-CA compliant patient summary is exchanged.

Intended Audience 

The intended audience of the pan-Canadian Patient Summary – FHIR Implementation Guide includes, but is not limited to, the following: 

• IT departments of healthcare institutions (technical product managers, IT managers, operations staff)
• Technical staff of vendors participating in the IHE initiative
• Experts involved in standards development
• Individuals and teams responsible for implementing software solutions such as project managers, CTOs, CISOs, software engineers, technical product managers, IT managers, operations staff, and other similar roles.

Overview

The pan-Canadian Patient Summary – FHIR Implementation Guide is the content data model for the Patient Summary-CA project, where participating jurisdictions and vendors can find relevant information for the following: 

• Scope Statement & Development Process
• General Principles and Design for the FHIR® Profiles
  • Profiling Conventions and Approach
  • Terminology Approach
• Relationship to Other Specifications
  • Comparison of IPS-CA and PS-CA
  • CA-Baseline
  • Jurisdictional Context
• Specification Guidance
  
  • Known Issues & Future Development
  • Must Support Definition
  • Exchanging Patient Summaries
  • Tooling & Validation 
  • Change Log
• FHIR Artifacts
  • Description of Patient Summary Composition Structure & Profiles (e.g., sections that make up the data model content for the PS-CA)
  • Profiles 
  • Extensions
  • Examples
  • Terminology
  • Patient Summary Composition (list of sections that make up content for Data Model Development Process
• Process for Providing Feedback

How to Access the FHIR Artifacts

The actual FHIR® artifacts are published in Simplifier, a FHIR® collaboration and publishing platform, where participating jurisdictions and vendors can view the FHIR resources for the Patient Summary-CA project. This document contains all of the background information on the general principles and design for the FHIR® profiles, profiling conventions and approach and description of the data model development process.

To access the PS-CA FHIR artifacts, go here.

How to Read the pan-Canadian Patient Summary - FHIR Implementation Guide

The HL7® FHIR® standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) defines how healthcare information can be exchanged between different computer systems regardless of how it is stored in those systems. It is assumed that readers have a moderate level of familiarity with reading HL7® FHIR® specification documents.