Spreadsheets for #FHIR Resources

May 22, 2019

One of the ubiquitous uses of Excel (or spreadsheets more generally) is for mapping purposes. 

To help people with spreadsheet mapping exercises, I’ve published the following files:

I also added this to the ci-build at http://build.fhir.org/definitions.xlsx.zip, so it will be present for all future versions of FHIR.

Example:

These spreadsheets are to help people who want to do spreadsheet based mapping, as a starting point. 

Note that spreadsheet mappings are limited in scope. In a typical mapping exercise, 90-95% of the elements map fairly straight-forwardly, with perhaps some code mapping for things like (1 2 9) to (M F U) - these things can reasonably and easily be expressed in a spreadsheetsand it’s the  easiest approach. But the other 5% typically involve structural re-arrangements, and/or decisions about managing specific instances in the target (new resources, when to create new items in a repeating list etc) - and spreadsheets aren’t an appropriate way to try to express these things. 

Alternatives: