Best way to get the status of a referral

That's really helpful too, thanks.

A different architectural approach would be to look at the Subscription resource. That would be lowest bandwidth as you'd only get a ping if the resource had actually changed, though there's no ability to filter to only see status changes - you could however use _elements.

The challenge with a custom operation is that standard FHIR systems would be unlikely to support it out of the box. However if you're comfortable with the notion that you're essentially building a custom interface and just wanting to make use of FHIR's conformance and other infrastructure, that approach works fine. (To be honest, even _elements isn't widely supported, so for maximum interoperability you'd need to be prepared to query the whole resource - or at least the 'summary' view of it.)

Wow, that's really helpful. Thanks a lot.

I think we'll likely take the #check-status approach.

-Tim

Technically you could possibly use the _elements parameter on the client end to specify that you're only interested in the status element.. e.g.:

fhirtest.uhn.ca/baseDstu2/ReferralRequest/2937?_elements=status
instead of
fhirtest.uhn.ca/baseDstu2/ReferralRequest/2937

If you want a completely separate handling routine for this (which you may well though) perhaps a FHIR extended operation would be a better fit. E.g. you could define a link like

fhirtest.uhn.ca/baseDstu2/ReferralRequest/2937/$check-status

That URL won't work obviously since that operation doesn't exist on our server, but you could put such an operation on yours. Generally such an operation would return a Parameters resource but it could also return a subset of a ReferralRequest resource or even just an HTTP status code.

I want to create a really low-overhead endpoint that provides just the status of a referral. It's going to be pinged regularly (e.g., 5 minutes per EMR), so i want it to be very small with just the status code and maybe one or two other variable (like when the status was chanaged).

I'm trying to find if there's a resource for this specifically in FHIR but haven't found one yet. Is there a recommended way to approach this?

Thanks
-Tim