Issue with searching all Patients.

[Daniel McBride]

I am trying to integrate my app with Cerner. I am working on an app that is supposed to analyze all patients in a system and output metrics for decision support. I need to iterate over all patients but the documentation appears to require that I include search criteria. 

It seems clear to me that the FHIR implementation at Cerner was not implemented with bulk data reading in mind. Is there a better, more appropriate alternative? Is there a way I could iterate through all patients?

On another note, I am having an issue with Practitioner where it appears to be ignoring the "_count=10" param and returning 100, which violates FHIR spec. Is there a workaround for this?

[Max Philips (Cerner)]

Hi,

That is correct, Cerner's FHIR APIs are currently centered around patients in context rather than bulk data workflows. I'm afraid I cannot offer you an alternative at this time within Cerner's FHIR APIs.

During recent HL7 Connectathons, Cerner has participated in the Bulk Data track and we are evaluating options in that area, so I would encourage you to monitor this group or fhir.cerner.com for any future updates that may assist you.

It's also correct that Cerner's Practitioner API does not support the _count parameter. For each API, the subset of HL7 FHIR-defined parameters that are supported for the API are documented on fhir.cerner.com: http://fhir.cerner.com/millennium/r4/individuals/practitioner/#parameters

Please let us know if you have any other questions!

Thanks,

Max (Cerner)

[Daniel McBride]

Is there potentially an alternative to FHIR that might offer bulk data access?

[Max Philips (Cerner)]

Hi,

The scope of this group is narrowed specifically to Cerner's existing implementation of FHIR APIs, so within that frame of reference there is no available alternative.

If you would like to answer a few questions about your use case, I can offer some suggestions of what else to try:

• Are you working with a particular Cerner client already? If so, I would recommend raising this question through their engagement leader who will be able to let you know what alternatives, if any, are available at that particular client site
• Are you interested in vendor-agnostic bulk data servers? If so, other reference servers documented here: https://confluence.hl7.org/display/FHIR/Public+Test+Servers may support bulk data workflows

Thanks,

Max (Cerner)