This page is part of the FHIRcast (v3.0.0: STU3 (v3.0.0)) based on FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) R4. This is the current published version. For a full list of available versions, see the Directory of published versions

Design Notes

Page standards status: Informative

This section contains various design decisions that might be relevant to understand the FHIRcast specification.

Remove webhook channel

Originally, FHIRcast supported a webhook channel (URL callbacks). As part of FHIRcast STU3, support for webhooks was removed in favor of websockets as the single communication method.

The field hub.channel.type was used to indicate the channel type to use for event notification. This field has been retained in order to support backward compatibility as well as facilitate potentially adding new channels in the future.

Similarly, the conformance statement related to WebSocketsupport was retained.

Content sharing approach

Two base use cases for content-exchange were identified during use case analysis. One employs a transactional, event-based exchange mechanism while the second uses content sharing content persisted in a FHIR server. It is also possible to use both methods concurrently. A detailed description of these approaches is found in the content sharing section of the specification.

FHIRcast starts to become a "base specification"

With the addition of update and select events, the scope of the FHIRcast specification significantly increases beyond context synchronization. In part this has lead to this FHIRcast publication specifying capabilities which require additional specification to be applied to specific interoperability use-cases. There is not yet a typical location for these additional specifications.