FHIR Document or DiagnosticReport?

Today I’m asking the question, not trying to answer it. Here’s the scenario.

A patient suffering from what appears to be worsening tendonitis goes for an MRI. His GP suspects a frozen shoulder.

The imaging clinic that performs the MRI send the results to the GP as a PDF document a few days later, verifying the frozen shoulder.

Assume the imaging clinic stores its data as FHIR resources.

The images are all stored on a DICOM server.

The radiologist’s findings are stored as Observations before being combined to produce the PDF report sent to the GP.

The GP works for a family clinic whose system is not fully FHIR aware. They’re comfortable with PDF reports.

My question is, would you expect a DiagnosticReport resource to be used here, with various Observations and Media resources referenced from it?

Or would you expect the imaging clinic to produce a FHIR Document that was then used to produce the PDF report?

More about FHIR Documents: https://build.fhir.org/documents.html
More about DiagnosticReport: http://hl7.org/fhir/R4/diagnosticreport.html

Discussion

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