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 new to FHIR. There’s an easy fix for that.
You should run in some test data supplied by a third party. I’ve found the sample data provided by Synthea and hosted by Mitre to be fantastic.
To get started, download their “1K Sample Synthetic Patient Records, FHIR R4” 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.
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