Announcing SMART Fetch (new bulk FHIR client)

[Michael Terry]

Hello! I'd like to announce a new open source bulk FHIR client that the SMART team has been working on: SMART Fetch (GitHub, documentation)

(Note: this is alpha software and has some rough edges / missing features still.)

In our experience with EHR bulk data implementations, we've learned that sometimes you need to go the extra mile to get all the clinical data you want out of them. So SMART Fetch offers some pragmatic features above and beyond a bulk export:

• It can "fake" a bulk export by stitching together searches over a list of patients (this works around limitations of some bulk export implementations, in either size of cohort or speed of export)
• It offers an alternative to "_since" for vendors that don't support meta.lastUpdated by using per-resource field filters to simulate a "resources created since" search (using fields like DiagnosticReport.issued)
• It supports extracting even more data than a bulk export would normally do, for example downloading clinical note attachments, referenced Medication resources, Observation.hasMember links, and DiagnosticReport.result links

And more! Anyway, we found this useful for our own FHIR data management, and hopefully others will too. Check out the links above for install instructions (a simple "pip install smart-fetch") and more information.