Important Information Regarding Paging

[Cerner FHIR Developers]

Hello,

 

For the safety of our clients and patients, we have important information to share regarding paging within the Ignite APIs for Millennium solution.

When performing a search, data may return across multiple pages. This is defined within the FHIR specification here.  We also make note in our Common Issues regarding the implementation of paging.

Developers need to account for data concurrency within the response. Both the DSTU2 and R4 FHIR specification states:

The results of a search operation are only guaranteed to be current at the instant the operation is executed. After the operation is executed, ongoing actions performed on the resources against which the search was executed will render the results increasingly stale. The significance of this depends on the nature of the search, and the kind of use that is being made of the results.

This is particularly relevant when the server is returning the results in a series of pages. It is at the discretion of the search engine of how to handle ongoing updates to the resources while the search is proceeding. 

 

When results are returned in a series of pages, you may see the same resource id on subsequent pages. Developers need to take this situation into account and filter by resource id and only return the latest version of that resource id. Displaying duplicate resource ids or any other manipulation may misrepresent the data thus impacting clinical decision support and patient safety. 

 

Thank you,

Cerner FHIR Developers