FHIR GraphQL

FHIR Implementation
#1

Is anyone working on GraphQL and FHIR? It seems to solve a lot of the developer pain points when working with FHIR. I’m thinking of developers working on patient facing apps where they may not be / or want to become health system experts and simply need a simple modern API to push and pull a small subset of FHIR data.

We are looking to extend this library GitHub - Asymmetrik/graphql-fhir: A secure GraphQL implementation for the HL7 FHIR specification based on the current implementation guide for GraphQL with FHIR and developed with Node.js and Express. for our own use but happy to make our work available on github. Before we start would be useful to know if anyone else is working on this? The idea is for this to act as a middleware facade to remote FHIR Servers rather than being a FHIR Server.

#2

HAPI FHIR server does GraphQL natively. I think it is still fairly experimental.

#3

@riksmithies do you know if there is a list of FHIR servers being used around the NHS and what they are exposing in terms of GraphQL?

#4

No I don’t have that or really know of any way to get that. I would expect that anyone doing FHIR would appear on the radar on maybe chat.fhir.org. But experience shows that entire live FHIR developments can be deployed in the NHS with no contact to HL7 UK or the FHIR community in general. Technical people don’t tend to want to reach out about their projects it seems.

#5

I don’t believe we are that far into FHIR. Only a few areas are beginning to deploy FHIR solutions in a truly interoperable eco system.

What we’ve had previously is a number of trail blazers (which is what I’d class graphQL as) which has been great for pushing the adoption, interop, etc.

#6

Hi,
I’m not aware of any GraphQL work in the NHS at the moment but I agree it’s worth a look.

I can vouch for the Assymetric Server though. Whilst I’ve not worked with the GraphQL version I did build on the Restful version to add support for the STU3 CareConnect profiles:

The dev team at Assymetric were helpful and accepted a couple of PRs from me.

The CareConnect classes in that project are built (mostly) automatically using a set of Python scripts that parse the CareConnect structuredefs:

It would be interesting to see how different that GraphQL version is - it might be possible to re-use the CareConnect models in the GraphQL version?

(I’m assuming the model is the same - and only the query interface differs?)

Emlyn.

#7

As I understand it GraphQL is a query and results shaping tech and the underlying model is just FHIR as usual.
CareConnect is FHIR profiles - an input template on top of FHIR in effect - so a CareConnect patient can just be queried as a FHIR patient.