1,000 sample patients with hundreds of resources per patient.
Getting started with FHIR when you’re facing an empty server and have no data to work with is a pain point for a lot of developers.
The sample data created by Synthea is great to get you started. It doesn’t contain every resource type, but it is rich and complicated data.
Download their 1K Sample Synthetic Patient Records, FHIR R4 file from this page:
https://synthea.mitre.org/downloads
There are a thousand bundles inside the zip download, each one containing a few hundred FHIR resources relating to the same patient.
Alongside the Patient resource, they typically include Organization, Practitioner, Encounter, a multitude of Observations, as well as Procedures, MedicationRequests and CarePlans.
To add them to your FHIR instance, create a new POST request in Postman using the root URL for 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 FHIR server, you should have a fully populated set of resources for a single patient loaded and ready to use in a few seconds.
If you’re a developer who doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty, you can dig a little deeper by looking at Synthea’s open source “Patient Generator” project.
https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea
Run it yourself, make some changes and see what comes out.
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