The NHS’s “Digital FHIR Medicines” is a great example of a well documented Implementation Guide. [1]
I was doing some research yesterday to see how various organizations document their IGs and stumbled across the latest version on Simplifier.
The past few months I’ve been working a lot in this area — researching, defining and finally documenting a new Guide. I was looking for some good real-world examples.
There are two key sections to the “Digital FHIR Medicines” IG.
The FHIR Assets section, which documents
- Profiles
- ValueSets
- Extensions
- Custom Operations
- CodeSystems
- ConceptMaps
https://simplifier.net/guide/nhsdigital-medicines/Home/FHIRAssets?version=2.8.18
And the Design section, which outlines
- The flow of data
- The FHIR resources used
- Actors involved
- FHIR workflows
https://simplifier.net/guide/nhsdigital-medicines/Home/Design?version=2.8.18
This is the section that is often missing from IGs. It brings clarity not just to the technical consumer but to the business as well.
There’s also a great set of JSON sample resources accessible from the main menu.
Documentation is a big factor in how quickly and effectively different consuming applications work with an Implementation Guide.
It’s important.
If you’re building an IG I recommend you bookmark this for future reference.
https://simplifier.net/guide/nhsdigital-medicines/Home/Introduction?version=2.8.18
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[1]. The NHS is the National Health Service in the UK. It deals with over 600 million patient interactions a year and it speaks FHIR.
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