How do I determine what the different types of searchable identifiers are in my domain?

[Marla F]

I've been using the sandbox very successfully for several weeks now with the "test" patients that have been provided.  I've just gotten access to my CERT domain, but I'm not sure how to identify the data I want to pull in my environment.  The IDs were given for the sandbox patients, but now I'll need to be able to pull my own CERT patients.  

For Encounter, it says to use an _id, but I don't know what that value equates to in my domain.  The main reason we want to use this connection is for MedicationAdministrations for a patient in the hospital, but I also do not know which patient ID to use.  It would need to be either a FIN, MRN or Corporate ID, but none of those have worked in my testing.   How do I determine which searchable IDs have been set up for each of these scopes?  

Thanks,

Marla

[Benjamin Eichhorn (Cerner)]

Hi Maria,

It sounds like you want to perform searches, depending on the type of app you are working on. For provider facing applications (that are launched against within the EHR) the patient ID and encounter can provided within the launch context. You can perform searches on most of our resources (which is documented on fhir.cerner.com) by the patient ID to retrieve the data regarding that specific patient (such as their Observations).

However, if you are developing an app that won't have a single patient that the app is launched against, you'll need to implement a way to search for Patients. The Patient resource supports a variety of search parameters that you can leverage. You can find these support search parameters for DSTU2 and R4 at https://fhir.cerner.com/millennium/dstu2/individuals/patient/#parameters and https://fhir.cerner.com/millennium/r4/individuals/patient/#parameters respectively. You can use the identifier search parameter to search by the MRN or you can implement a search by the patients first and or last name. I won't go through all of the available parameters as those are documented but in general you can leverage these methods to determine the patient ID. After that you can perform a search on Encounter by the patient ID to retrieve the Encounters for the patient.

Thanks,

Ben (Cerner)