Search multiple FHIR resources with single GET request?

[george...@gmail.com]

Hello,

Does anyone know if its possible to sort multiple FHIR resources with a single GET request?  For instance could I search for a patient's heart rate and WBC count with a single GET request?  Could I use a single GET request to find all lab values I want?  Thanks.

George. 

[Andrew Torres]

FHIR does support the concept of getting multiple resources in a single request (Include). Our implementation does not currently support the include concept. Currently you can retrieve a single resource type in a single request. Your application can certainly implement multithreading or other asynchronous methods to handle multiple requests simultaneously.

You can, within a single request, search for multiple LOINC code. You can see this example on how to include multiple LOINC codes:

https://fhir-open.sandboxcernerpowerchart.com/dstu2/d075cf8b-3261-481d-97e5-ba6c48d3b41f/Observation?patient=4342009&code=http://loinc.org|2571-8,http://loinc.org|9830-1

I am searching for observations for patient 4342009 that have a LOINC code of 2571-8 or 9830-1. You can replace the LOINC codes with LOINC codes that you are specifically looking for(WBC and heart rate). You can see more examples and some LOINC code values on the Argonaut wiki[1]

If you want to return all observation for a patient you can simply include the patient as a search parameter:

https://fhir-open.sandboxcernerpowerchart.com/dstu2/d075cf8b-3261-481d-97e5-ba6c48d3b41f/Observation?patient=4342009

This will return all observations for patient 4342009. You can find out more about search on the Argonaut wiki[1], fhir documentation[2], or our documentation[3].

[1]http://argonautwiki.hl7.org/index.php?title=Laboratory_Results

[2]http://hl7.org/fhir/DSTU2/index.html

[3]code.cerner.com

-Drew

[Jenni Syed]

Note: generally getting "all" observations for a patient isn't something you would normally want. Typically, you would limit by the types of results you want and/or date range [1]. All acceptable query parameters for our FHIR server are documented on fhir.cerner.com.

[1] http://fhir.cerner.com/dstu2/observation/

[Chris Moesel]

I don't think Cerner supports this right now, but... FHIR does provide another way (besides "_include") to search for multiple things in a single request.  You can post a bundle as a batch request containing multiple embedded FHIR queries (one per entry).  In this way you can group any arbitrary number of searches into a single request.  See the example here: http://hl7-fhir.github.io/bundle-request-simplesummary.json.html

Again, I suspect it's not supported by all implementations (including Cerner), but it is allowed by the spec.

-Chris