If you’re learning FHIR you need test data.
You can’t write complicated queries without complicated data. And that means large Bundles of interconnected resources.
The sample data created by Synthea is great to get you started. It doesn’t contain every resource type, but each bundle does contains hundreds of resources connected to a single patient.
Here’s a direct link to a zip file containing 1,000 individual Patient Bundles.
I won’t link directly to their download page as the links on that page contain updated Bundles that fail to load as they’re all missing Practitioner resources.
But all the Bundles in the above archive from 2019 work.
Alongside the Patient resource, each Bundle typically includes:
- Organizations
- Practitioners
- Encounters
- Observations
- Procedures
- MedicationRequests
- CarePlans
To add them to your FHIR server, create a POST request in Postman using the root URL of your FHIR server. Paste the contents of one of the sample bundles into the request body as raw JSON, and send the request.
Depending on the speed of your server, you should have a fully populated set of resources for a single patient loaded and ready to use in a few seconds.
Some FHIR servers (Microsoft, cough!) have limits on the number of resources that can be loaded in a single transaction. If you’re using a Microsoft server, choose some of the smaller Bundles first.
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