Ph.D. Defense: Timoteus Ziminski

Title: Extending the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Standard with Design Pattern-Like Capabilities by Defining a Framework of Meta Resources

Major Advisor: Dr. Steven A. Demurjian
Associate Advisors:   Dr. Thomas Agresta, Dr. Swapna Gokhale
Participating Faculty Members:  Dr. Dong-Guk Shin, Dr. Zhijie Jerry Shi, Dr. Derek Aguiar

Date/Time: Friday, November 18th, 2022, 1:00 pm

Location: WebEx

Meeting link:  https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=m685a77d8d95a720acea529d027169a71
Meeting number:  2624 384 2478

Password:  UcfcY3RXp62

Abstract

The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard from the international Health Language Seven (HL7) organization has been mandated by the United States Office of the National Coordinator to promote the secure exchange of healthcare data for patients using cloud-based APIs. FHIR reformulated the HL7 XML standard by defining over 135 resources that conceptualize the different aspects of healthcare data, such as patients, practitioners, organizations, services, appointments, encounters, diagnostic data, and medications. Developers of healthcare applications can select a subset of the resources required to solve their particular problems and orchestrate them within their software using the standard’s APIs and message formats with minimal effort.

However, the standard provides no way to effectively organize a subset of resources into a higher-level construct similar to software design patterns and therefore exposes users to reimplementing solutions when facing problems of the same type in slightly differing environments. In this dissertation, we leverage the design pattern concept to extend the FHIR standard by defining meta resources, a conceptual construct that clearly defines the involved resources and their interactions into one unified and reusable artifact. By employing meta resources, we introduce the option to use a higher level of abstraction in designing, implementing, and verifying functionalities built on the FHIR standard. For interaction with the core standard, we first leverage built-in FHIR extension mechanisms such as FHIR Profiles and Bundle resources to integrate the meta resource into the resource contextualization layer of the FHIR standard.

Expanding on our initial findings, we propose a new PatternDefintion resource as an extension to FHIR’s foundation resources. The PatternDefinition captures the essence of the meta resources in a design pattern-like artifact that supports two separate design processes (UML-driven and FHIR profile-driven). We explore related software tools for both paths and expand this discussion to a detailed description of a tool-supported design process for the UML-driven approach. To further illustrate the concepts of this work, we use a mobile health application for medication reconciliation that integrates information from multiple electronic health records as an example.