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Overview: FHIR Implementation Guide for Diagnostic Services

Background

The National Information Board (NIB)'s roadmap published in September 2015 Work_Stream_2.1_Final.pdf cited the National Laboratory Medicine Catalogue (NLMC) as one of the highest priority national information standards to complete and use within the next 1-3 years. The NLMC is thus planned to replace the current primary care pathology data standard, the Pathology Bounded Code List (PBCL). PBCL is a subset within the Read V2 terminology, and Read V2 is being nationally withdrawn in 2017. The NLMC will also address current gap areas in PBCL, including setting data standards for use across all care settings, for all pathology disciplines (e.g. including microbiology, histopathology, cytology, genetics and blood transfusion), for reporting, and including fully-approved standard units of measure per quantitative test. The NLMC is currently planned to adopt international technical standards wherever fit for purpose, including SNOMED CT, LOINC and UCUM.

The move to adopting the NLMC as a single set of pathology data standards for use across all care settings, addressing current content gaps and standardising pathology data across care settings requires the current national primary care pathology report message (profiled in EDIFACT) to be replaced to facilitate this change.

The FHIR resources in the Diagnostic Data Services Domain Message Specification are bundled together to construct:

• Diagnostic Data Services Report

Further Information

This FHIR Messaging specification is based on and intended to be used alongside the published FHIR DSTU2 1.0.1 (Sept 2015) specification.

Please note: this FHIR Messaging specification is published as a 'work in progress' version and as such is subject to change. As it is a draft, it is not in an implementable state. It has been published to show the direction of travel and to serve as a discussion document for parties involved with the implementation of Diagnostic Data Services FHIR based communications.