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hl7-fhir

Is there an easy way to generate sample FHIR resources?

Without using commercial tools, is there an easy way to generate sample FHIR resources?

I'm working an a project to store FHIR messages to Elasticsearch, and I need a tool to generate FHIR sample messages in real-time to ship over TCP/IP.

Solution

  • Did some digging and here is what I've found.

    If you do not need a lot of samples, the easiest way is to grab a zip file with resource examples from hl7 website http://hl7.org/fhir/downloads.html

    IMHO the easiest way I've found to get more than a few samples is by using Synthea project. You can generate millions of records of synthetic realistic data https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea

    They even run a public server. Here is an example to get a bundle with 100 patients - very neat! https://syntheticmass.mitre.org/fhir/Patient?_offset=0&_count=100

    You can also find examples of bulk FHIR API implementations - some of them have demo web sites you can use to download examples: https://github.com/smart-on-fhir/fhir-bulk-data-docs/blob/master/implementations.md

    Another generator in Python from SMART on FHIR project (looks outdated): https://github.com/smart-on-fhir/sample-patients.