From the FHIR documentation: “Resource instances that permit narrative SHOULD always contain narrative to support human-consumption as a fallback.”
All but three FHIR resources can include a narrative, which means that most resources you’re working with can and should populate the narrative element.
The narrative would normally contain a summary of the information in the resource, and may contain information from referenced resources.
Example: the narrative for a Procedure resource might contain a summary of the patient undergoing the procedure, the practitioner performing the procedure, as well as details of the procedure itself.
Structurally, the narrative contains status and div attributes. The div contains the human readable text, formatted using basic XHTML. No scripts or external style sheets are allowed, but simple formatting as well as links to pages and images are allowed.
More about the narrative: https://hl7.org/fhir/narrative.html
Out-of-the-box FHIR solutions will often populate the narrative be default, but if you’re building your own solution you may need to implement the narrative construction yourself.
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