FHIR Questionnaire Support

FHIR Questionnaire Standard

The HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard defines how healthcare information can be exchanged between different computer systems, regardless of how it is stored in those systems. The FHIR Questionnaire resource is defined in the FHIR Standard.

A Questionnaire is an organized collection of questions intended to solicit information from patients, providers, or other individuals involved in the healthcare domain. They may be simple, flat lists of questions or they can be questions hierarchically organized in groups and sub-groups. The Questionnaire defines the questions to be asked, how they are ordered and grouped, any intervening instructional text, and what the constraints are on the allowed answers. The results of a Questionnaire can be communicated using the QuestionnaireResponse resource.

LogicNets Standard Operating Model (pre-Release 8) 

LogicNets offers subject matter experts (SMEs) an authoring tool (the LogicNets Designer) in which SMEs can model content/expert knowledge. An example of such content is a medical guideline. In prior LogicNets releases, users can execute the guideline content on the server side using a use-case framework (e.g. AssessmentFramework) that allows an end-user to interact with the guideline and the system will generate a report in the process. Secondly, users can connect guidelines to a Web API, which executes the guideline based on the posted data set and generates a report as a response.

FHIR Questionnaire Support

Besides the two execution options mentioned above, in LogicNets Release 8 and above, users can generate a FHIR Questionnaire (https://www.hl7.org/fhir/questionnaire.html) export.

The FHIR Questionnaire standard supports many concepts that are also supported in the LogicNets runtime. The LogicNets general parts collection is much broader than FHIR questionnaire capability, but the most common UI parts - such as the text-input, radio, checklist, dropdown, and date-input - do have a counterpart in the FHIR Questionnaire standard.

In addition,  the FHIR Questionnaire standard supports extensions (https://www.hl7.org/fhir/defining-extensions.html), which allows other specific LogicNets parts and features to be added to the standard where necessary.

FHIR Questionnaire Features and Advantages

Using the FHIR Questionnaire offers the following features and advantages:

• The format is well documented.
• The format is widely adopted in the Healthcare industry.
• Clients can build or buy render engines they can fully integrate with their systems.
• Since the content is fully descriptive it is often possible to automatically convert to customer-proprietary format.
• Due to the extensibility functionality of FHIR, custom data such as tags and other meta-data can be exported as well.
• You can run the the renderer client-side, which makes the solution easily scalable without large infrastructure requirements.

FHIR Questionnaire General Limitations

The FHIR Questionnaire format has also some general limitations:

• Not all guideline concepts can be described in a FHIR Questionnaire resource. Examples include database calls, advanced UI input (database grids, menus), outbound web-service calls, and advanced processing (e.g. randomizing, looping).
• Existing content may need to be redesigned to support conversion to the FHIR Questionnaire, or a part of the content may be supported or shall be refactored to a server-side and client-side set.
• The FHIR Questionnaire standard may be interpreted differently by different vendors, which can cause interoperability issues.