Automating submission of RFCs to Canada Health Infoway through a RESTful API

Hi all,

I had a call with my team and some of the CHI's team members to discuss how we can improve on current processes.

We’re trying to automate any steps that don’t add any particular value to our overall processes of terminology management. One of these processes is requesting modifications to SNOMED CT. In particular, there are two types of RFCs that we request more often:

1. Addition of new terms
2. Translation of existing terms

In either case, the current mechanism is for us to use the form available here:

informs.infoway-inforoute.ca/Batch!showLoad.jspa

This presents a web upload form where we include some metadata and we upload an Excel file that follows the template provided by CHI. Once the file is uploaded, we get presented with a Batch ID which is then used in a URL like this:

informs.infoway-inforoute.ca/issues/?jql=%22Batch%20ID%22%20~%20BSCT-17297

Where BSCT-17297, is the batch ID we got from the submission of the Excel file.

This URL then gives us a table that we can export to CSV with all the columns that are available.

There are two particular things I'd like to automate in this process at this time:

1. Upload of the Excel file
2. Getting access to the new SCTID that gets eventually created. Today, the new SCTID is buried inside one of the comments, which is impossible for us to obtain and parse.

I am proposing that a RESTful API be created so that we can easily import the Excel file (it would even be better not to have to use Excel, but we can attack that later on). This would be minimal work and use all the current tools but allow CHI's clients to start to innovate with automated tools that lead to better performance, effectiveness and efficiency.

The number of steps currently needed lead to a lot of errors since we're copying/pasting from different sources (which contain different formats) and also it's extremely tedious and time consuming.

I have gone through the official channels at CHI to request these two functionalities be implemented. I also wanted to go out to this community since I'm assuming you are all using some sort of the InfoRMS procedure for your own work. The more we can automate the better it is for everybody.

Comments?