FHIR operations are thinly supported by most servers.
Patient $everything is the exception.
Its purpose is to return ‘everything’ about a patient from a single GET request. While the definition of ‘everything’ might vary server to server, it essentially means just that.
All resources about a specific patient.
I loaded a rich data set for a patient “Sally Nightingale” into the HAPI test server. A few hundred resources documenting a pregnancy and the healthcare activities that surround it.
I then made a call to the server using the Patient $everything operation to see what came back.
The request looks like this: /Patient/44690717/$everything
The volume of resources built up around a patient can be huge. Even a single diagnosis followed by some tests and a procedure can lead to hundreds or thousands of linked resources.
Here are some of the resource types that came back:
- Patient
- Encounter
- Condition
- Procedure
- Observation
- CarePlan
- Claim
- AllergyIntolerance
- ExplanationOfBenefit
Sharing data like this is at the heart of what FHIR is for. The requesting system understands FHIR. The receiving system understands FHIR. The requester is authorized to make the request.
You can run the request yourself here: http://hapi.fhir.org/baseR4/Patient/44690717/$everything
If you’re unfamiliar with the $everything operation, try it out for a patient on your own server and see what comes back.
More about the Patient $everything operation: https://www.hl7.org/fhir/R4/patient-operation-everything.html
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