Reflective openEHR-to-FHIR: Java class-based generator for transforming openEHR compositions to fast healthcase interoperability resources (FHIR) bundles.

Abstract

BackgroundAt our hospital's university, the data integration center (DIC) has the primary task of importing data from various systems, including unstructured medical reports and structured laboratory data into the openEHR data repository. As we participate in the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII), we have an agreement to share common consent data for research purposes. The requirement for this is that the data must be available in the FHIR format.ObjectivesAs a result, we have to transform our openEHR into FHIR data. Both formats are different, and simply programming a module to transform each openEHR template into a FHIR resource can be time-consuming and neither supportable nor updatable.MethodsWe have designed a method and developed an open-source software artifact that transforms an openEHR composition into a single FHIR resource or a bundle of resources, through the dynamic declaration of openEHR fields to API methods. The mappings can be updated at runtime, while the software artifact allows developers and end users to test and validate the mappings.ResultsWe currently use our software, which is able to do robust transformations and has, until now, successfully stored and processed over 30 million FHIR bundles.