Which FHIR Resource Type could best be used to define data source configuration information

Question

Data Integration sources come in many flavors (CCDA, HL7, FHIR, Flat File, ...). The static details about a source provide valuable details to consumers of data.

Consider a model where disparate input formats are transformed to FHIR resources and we'd want to allow the consumers of FHIR resources to consider the unbound list of details of the integration.

The following would be a sample of the details to record in the resource:

• Data Producer details (e.g. Source mnemonics/names, expected reference specification,
• Data format (e.g. CDA, HL7, FHIR, ASCII delimited)
• Connectivity protocols (e.g. sFTP, XSD.b, API)
• Connectivity parameters (e.g. Sender IP, Sender App, Author device, trusted source identifiers)
• Data frequency (e.g. real-time, hourly, daily, monthly)
• Source Support (e.g. technical/business POCs, phone numbers, email, SLA)
• Description of the data source ("XYZ provider extracts details from it's Foo EMR in ascii delimited format with no validation of provider identifiers or harmonization of coding systems data. Yada yada yada)
• ...

I've considered including a link in resource.meta.source to a Provenance resource but that appears to be more supportive of a runtime instance (e.g. specific details of the processing of the data) vs details of the design time config and business details.

Curious to know if there are others trying to do this and what would be considered a most appropriate resource type to use for these details?

Answer 1

There isn't really a resource specifically designed for this. However, there a few options:

1. You could use DeviceMetric. Technically an endpoint is a Device. While DeviceMetric is designed for capturing the configuration of clinical devices, there's nothing that would stop it from being used to convey configuration settings of other types of software systems.

2. You could define them in arbitrary JSON, XML or some other syntax and transmit them using Binary (or if you want metadata, DocumentReference or Media or Observation)

3. You could use Basic with extensions for your various configuration parameters.

What's appropriate depends in part on what your objectives are for exposing this information in FHIR? Who's consuming it? What are they expected to do with that information?