DiagnosticReport vs DocumentReference

[Francesca Ricci-Tam]

Hello,

I have a mostly theoretical question.

The patient-facing confidential app that my colleagues and I are developing is meant to allow a user to aggregate their health records, so we are testing it currently on sandbox test patients by fetching all the resource types available in Cerner's Patient scope.

We are, however, using only the R4 endpoint. DiagnosticReport is not available on the R4 endpoint, so we are not getting DiagnosticReport.

My question is: how crucial is it to have access to DiagnosticReport resources if we can access things like DocumentReference in R4? Does DiagnosticReport contain info that cannot be obtained from DocumentReference or other resource types, and if so, what is this info and should we instead be trying to get DiagnosticReport resources as well to have a more complete set of health records for the user?

(As a side note, are there any plans in the future to add DiagnosticReport to the R4 endpoint?)

Thank you,

Francesca Ricci-Tam

[Fenil Desani (Cerner)]

Hello,

While we won't be able to comment on what your App needs to implement, The plans for DiagnosticReport will be similar but different to DocumentReference, in R4. DocumentReference is a way just to get the document (or report). DiagnosticReport will be the way to get the document (or report) as well as the additional diagnostic information (paneled results, linked orders, etc). If you are not familiar with how the US-Core profile defines guidance for these resources, referencing it may help (link here). 

As of today, you can use hybrid of DSTU2 and R4. Yes, there are plans to add R4 DiagnosticReport in future.

Thanks,

Fenil