Question: #FHIR Documents and Composition

Sep 12, 2017

Question What is the relationship between FHIR Documents and  composition resources? Meaning, what is the best way to capture/store in FHIR, documents that are not necessarily related to clinical info (file, images, file reference links to external content systems etc)

If I have several documents that need to be associated to a patient and organizations and was looking for your thoughts on best practices you have seen

Answer

Documents like this - files, images, reference links to content systems - these are best handled using DocumentReference.  Composition is used for documents that have tightly controlled content. a mix of narrative and data.