Tips for working with FHIR in Atticus

This page contains tips and best practices for working with FHIR resources in Atticus to help you get the most out of the platform.

Store your internal identifiers in FHIR resources

When creating resources in Atticus, you want to use your internal identifiers to retrieve them.

For example, you might want to use your hospital's patient ID to retrieve a patient resource. To do this, you can store your internal identifiers in the identifier property of the FHIR resource. This property is an array of Identifier objects that can be used to store your internal identifiers.

Identifier properties

  • Name
    system*
    Type
    uri
    Description

    A URI that identifies the system that the identifier comes from. It servers as a namespace for the value property.

  • Name
    value*
    Type
    string
    Description

    The actual identifier value. This value should be unique within the system that the system property points to.

Example of an Identifier object

Important rules

  • The system property must be a URI.
  • The domain of the system should be owned by your organization or your organization's IT provider.
  • The value property should be unique within the system. For example, if the system property points to your hospital's patient ID system, the value should be unique for each patient in your hospital.

Usage in headers and query parameters

When using identifiers in headers or query parameters, you need to combine the system and the value of the identifier in a single string. The convention is to concatenate the system and the value with a pipe |. For example, if the system is http://myhospital.org/patient-id and the value is 12345, the combined identifier would be http://myhospital.org/patient-id|12345. This convention is used when identifying users in authenticated requests and when performing conditional operations on resources.

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