Last year I added a conformance checker to the Vanya FHIR Viewer. It was a weekend’s work and it’s been a life saver ever since.
My intent was to quickly flag non-conforming resources for investigation. I was expecting the occasional error here and there. I got more than I bargained for.
Almost all of the FHIR servers I looked at were accepting non-conforming resources. And they were doing so in a host of different ways.
- Missing mandatory elements
- Invalid ID values
- Codes that were not in the specified ValueSet
- Corrupt base64 strings
Public test servers are infamous for bad data. The true test came when I pointed Vanya at some of the non-public servers I worked with. Servers where the data was supposed to be good.
Let’s just say a lot of user stories were added to the backlog that week.
The first step in fixing a problem is knowing you have a problem. Vanya’s conformance checker is an early visual indicator of whether or not you have a problem.
In this short video I show you in real-time some of the errors I found.
---