Towards Interoperability in Clinical Research - Enabling FHIR on the Open-Source Research Platform XNAT

Maryna Khvastova,Michael Witt,Andrea Essenwanger,Dagmar Krefting,Julian Sass,Sylvia Thun

doi:10.1007/s10916-020-01600-y

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to enable interoperability of the research data management system XNAT by the implementation of the HL7 standards framework Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). The FHIR implementation is realized as an XNAT plugin (Source code: https://github.com/somnonetz/xnat-fhir-plugin), that allows easy adoption in arbitrary XNAT instances. The approach is demonstrated on patient data exchange between a FHIR reference implementation and XNAT.

Highlights

Interoperability is one of the key issues in research, as defined by the FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management [8]
With the support of the REST architecture in HL7-Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR),6 interoperability at the communication level is becoming easier to achieve, as REST APIS are used in many research platforms and modern data management systems (DMS) and are often extensible
Various abstract data types are available, that can be extended by the definition of a new data type derived from the built-in type in an additional XML schema. Such data types are implemented as XNAT plugins, that are automatically integrated when present at startup

Summary

Introduction

Interoperability is one of the key issues in research, as defined by the FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management [8]. Such data types are implemented as XNAT plugins, that are automatically integrated when present at startup. FHIR defines a set of health data resources and a REST API on top for accessing them.

Results

Conclusion