One of the core 'tenets' of FHIR is that the resources are deliberately kept simple, but that there is a built in mechanism to allow them to be adjusted to meet a particular Use Case. At the level of the individual resource, this is done by:
(There is more that you can do, but the above is likely to be the more common ones)
Then, you can take the individual 'profiles' of resources, and bundle them into an Implementation Guide, that consists of a number of different profiled resources and supporting documentation.
There are a number of different resources in FHIR to support this.
The StructureDefinition resource is the one that actually defines what are the elements within a single resource. In fact, all of the FHIR resources are defined using this resource (called 'eating your own dog food' by some!) This resource is also used to define extensions as well as the resource - as they share the same characteristics).
clinFHIR is capable of creating simple resource profiles - including extensions - to illustrate how this process works.
The profiling capabilities of clinFHIR are quite restricted, and only support a subset of the FHIR capabilities. The forge tool is intended as a production level tool that can implement all of the profiling capabilities. |