We are excited to announce that the OCL FHIR Corebeta has been launched! Here’s a quick rundown:
What is the OCL FHIR Corebeta?
The OCL FHIR Corebeta integrates HL7 FHIR Terminology Service capabilities based on the R4 specification directly into the OCL core. Building FHIR directly into the OCL core means that users can seamlessly switch between FHIR requests and OCL API requests for the same content, providing flexibility and powerful capabilities that are not available in FHIR.
Which FHIR terminology resources and operations are supported?
The OCL FHIR Corebeta supports CRUD requests for FHIR CodeSystem, ValueSet and ConceptMap resources and the $lookup, $validate-code, $expand, and $translate operations.
Is the OCL FHIR Corebeta fully compliant with FHIR R4 or with the IHE Sharing Valuesets Concept Maps profile?
Not quite, but that is the plan! While the OCL FHIR Corebeta supports the key resources along with many of their attributes and operations, there are still gaps. We aim to do formal compliance testing and to provide documentation on the supported capabilities and gaps in the coming months.
Why is the OCL FHIR Core still in “beta”?
The “beta” flag implies that features are still evolving and undergoing testing. The beta flag will be removed once an OCL FHIR Core capability has undergone sufficient testing. As an open source community, this will only happen with your support, so please reach out if you’d like to get involved.
Can I start to use the OCL FHIR Corebeta?
Yes! The OCL FHIR Corebeta is already available in OCL Online and it is merged into the master branch in the OCL GitHub oclapi2 repository.
What HL7 FHIR terminology content is available in OCL Online?
The OCL team is working to publish the full set of HL7’s curated FHIR Terminology resources in OCL Online as soon as possible. In fact, we bulk load the 1k CodeSystems and 2k ValueSets in this package on OCL’s development servers to validate OCL FHIR Corebeta capabilities. We will update this post when it is available.
Wait a minute, didn’t I hear about the OCL FHIR Core last year? And what about the original OCL FHIR service?
OCL released the “OCL FHIR Service” in 2021, offering a limited set of FHIR capabilities as a Java-based wrapper around the OCL back-end. In 2022, the OCL team soft launched an early “alpha” version of the new OCL FHIR Core, which integrated a limited set of FHIR terminology capabilities directly into the OCL core and made it available for testing. Both of these older services have been retired with the launch of the OCL FHIR Corebeta.
Where can I find examples and technical documentation?
OCL-specific documentation is forthcoming, and we will update this post as soon as it is available. In the meantime, head on over to the HL7 FHIR Terminology documentation for the full specification.
What’s next for the OCL FHIR Corebeta?
The OCL has big plans for the OCL FHIR Core in 2023 and beyond. Take a look at the 2023 OCL Community Roadmap for full details. Here is a quick summary:
- Scripts to bulk load and validate HL7 FHIR terminologies and WHO SMART Guideline content
- Support for FHIR Implementation Guide builds
- FHIR/SVCM compliance testing
- FHIR Compatibility statement
- Official launch for OCL FHIR Core v1
How do I get involved?
Contact a community member in one of our many forums, like our weekly OCL Dev and OCL Architecture calls, or email info@openconceptlab.org to get involved. We are also starting a new OCL FHIR Core working group, so stay tuned for more information.