patient discovery

On October 7, 2022, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) project released a Draft TEFCA Facilitated FHIR Implementation Guide. As described in an earlier post, the project released a specific plan for integrating HL7 Fast Health Information Resources (FHIR) into the architecture that was defined explicitly in a new Roadmap for later implementation. This draft implementation guide (IG) provides the initial proposed details for this functionality. TEFCA only poses technical requirements on its direct participants, the Qualified Health Information Networks, or QHINs, but they are not the actual sources nor destinations of the data. The actual “FHIR details” are sketchy in this IG; maybe that is by design. It seems to specify just what the QHIN needs to know to do patient discovery and move the query and response around rather than any specifics on where a query originates nor where the response goes, let alone what data is contained.

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