Question: #FHIR Terminology services

Apr 25, 2018

Question:

Do you know if there is an HL7  official list of vendors supporting the HL7 FIHR terminology service? Also, are there any plans to certify HL7 FHIR terminology services?

Answer:

There’s no official list. The nearest we get to maintaining a list was in this wiki page, but the specific list seems to have fallen off. So here’s my list:

  • Ontoserver- official terminology service for Australia. Looks like it;s on the path to being adopted in other countries as well
  • Apelon DTS- open source, and a full blown terminology service that is filling out their FHIR API
  • Art-Decor- provides FHIR API to the content in art-decor
  • Terminz- focused on providing terminology services in NZ
  • VSAC- provides some FHIR terminology services for the value sets already in VSAC
  • HAPI- provides some terminology services but I’m not sure how complete and tested this is
  • FHIRServer(my server)

Of these, I believe that the most thoroughly tested (at least on the FHIR API side) are Ontoserver and my server. My server runs tx.fhir.org which provides terminology services across the public FHIR community, but needs a lot of work to turn into a general purpose server. Ontoserver is a general purpose server and is very thoroughly tested through the Australian NCTS process.

We’ve talked about certifying terminology services, and we’re getting to the point of stability where it’s time to do that. HL7 hasn’t done that before, and we don’t know whether we should, or IHE should. But IHE hasn’t done testing on specifications they don’t own before, and the terminology service vendors haven’t decided whether they see a market advantage in certification yet (and how much certification $$ is viable) - so it’s basically an open question right now.