SENAITE + FHIR: status update and roadmap?

#1

Hello SENAITE Community!

Happy to join and meet you all.

Some background first:
I represent a core contributing organisation to OpenMRS, the open source EMR system, and we are currently heavily involved in pushing forward the roadmap of the new OpenMRS 3.0.

Long story short, part of our roadmap consists in integrating OpenMRS with a LIMS… with FHIR messages. My understanding is that at this juncture, and looking at the landscape of open source LIMS, only OpenELIS Global speaks FHIR (more here on that)… I have seen this proposal:

However I believe that this DS grant was unfortunately not awarded, so in a nutshell my question is: what is the status of FHIR-zing SENAITE? Is there any plan to make it run on top/alongside a HAPI FHIR server? … etc etc.

Happy to discuss this with maintainers involved with the topic.

All the best.
- Dimitri

P.S. Tagging a couple of maintainers, sorry about the noise here: @Espurna @xispa

1 Like
#2

Hi @mksd and welcome!

I will try to answer your question, but it may not be the most accurate one…

As you saw, we did some research on HL7 (https://applications.digitalsquare.io/notice-c/concept-note/70) but it was never implemented.

The development of a HL7 FHIR interface to make a subset of resources as FHIR resources accessible through a FHIR API is a feature that can always be considered with the right resources. Of course that it will be welcomed if anyone wants to implement it.

To give you some background on how new features are developed: SENAITE is a project maintained by professional providers and the community, so new features are usually developed because:

  1. Clients invest on SENAITE to have the feature they require
  2. The maintainers invest in a feature under their own considerations
  3. Someone from the community PRs a feature (To be honest, this scenario is not very common)

This said, while some companies are sorting the idea of investing in an HL7 interface, right now there is not a plan that I know to implement a FHIR interface.

Companies that want to interface medical systems with SENAITE usually make use of SENAITE JSON API https://senaitejsonapi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You can find some doctests here (https://github.com/senaite/senaite.jsonapi/tree/1.x/src/senaite/jsonapi/tests/doctests) in order to have a better understanding of the API.

I hope this explanation puts some light on your question.

Best regards,

#3

Thanks a lot for your insights @Espurna.

I think what is going to happen for now is that we will design middleware messaging routes that fully support FHIR, that is to cater for LIMS that can take it.

But then… we will design last mile transformers FHIR ←→ SENAITE JSON for SENAITE. I mean, that’s the idea at this juncture, we will have to assess the actual overhead when we get closer to it.