Application of HL7 FHIR in a Microservice Architecture for Patient Navigation on Registration and Appointments
This work addresses interoperability challenges in hospital environments, specifically for Patient Navigation, but is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the complexity and interoperability issues of monolithic Electronic Health Record Systems by developing a prototype using a microservices architecture with HL7 FHIR for Patient Navigation, resulting in microservices capable of synchronous communication for querying and recording information while isolating domains and maintaining functionality.
Electronic Health Record Systems (EHR-S) are commonly developed in monolithic architectures. This architectural style presents greater complexity and demands more effort when we think of interoperability. A solution proposal is the creation of Microservices that use HL7 FHIR as an interoperability strategy. In this sense, it is presented the development of a prototype, based on a microservices architecture, to act in a real scenario of Patient Navigation (PN). The problem was subdivided into 3 steps: definition of architecture, development and construction of an interface to simulate the role of the navigator. The Patient and Appointment microservices are capable of synchronous communication to query and record information. In general, the implemented architectural style not only isolates information domains but can receive data from multiple sources while maintaining essential functionality. This type of approach plays a crucial role in a hospital environment, specifically in PN, highlighting the importance of the standard and expanding the possibilities for further research to be conducted.