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Connecting to External FHIR Servers

caution

CLI connections to external FHIR servers is in Beta. Please join us on Discord with questions or email hello@medplum.com.

When building an application, you many need to query or write data to an external FHIR server as part of your application's workflow. For example:

  • When a new patient is created, see if that patient already exists in another server
  • When an encounter is finalized, synchronize the encounter documentation to another FHIR server
  • On a bi-weekly basis, pull new FHIR data from a partner using a Bulk FHIR API

To enable these scenarios, you will need a clientId or clientSecret to access the system you want to connect to. Please note that different systems have different levels of functionality, and so the commands in the CLI are not guaranteed to work.

The examples below use the CLI optional flags.

In this example, we will show how to search for a patient by identifier using the command line.

medplum get 'Patient?identifier:contains=3SH0A00AA00' --base-url <base-url> --fhir-url-path <fhir-url-path> --token-url <token-url> --client-id <client-id> --client-secret <client-secret>

Example: Create encounter​

In this example, an Encounter is created in another system using the command line.

medplum post Encounter '{"resourceType": "Encounter", "status": "finished", "class": {"system": "http://terminology.hl7.org/CodeSystem/v3-ActCode", "code": "AMB"}, "type": [{"coding": [{"system": "http://snomed.info/sct", "code": "162673000", "display": "General examination of patient (procedure)"}], "text": "General examination of patient (procedure)"}], "subject": {"reference": "Patient/13e44a47-636b-49e2-adb3-9f19c7e0e47a", "display": "Mr. Dustin31 Ritchie586"}}' --base-url <base-url> --fhir-url-path <fhir-url-path> --token-url <token-url> --client-id <client-id> --client-secret <client-secret>

Example: Bulk FHIR Export​

In this example, Bulk FHIR ndjson files are exported from the server and stored on on the local drive.

medplum bulk export -e Group/all --base-url <base-url> --fhir-url-path <fhir-url-path> --token-url <token-url> --client-id <client-id> --client-secret <client-secret>

For example, CMS BCDA publishes a Bulk FHIR test server. You can get test credentials here and try the following command.

medplum bulk export -e Group/all --base-url https://sandbox.bcda.cms.gov --fhir-url-path api/v2/ --token-url https://sandbox.bcda.cms.gov/auth/token --client-id <client-id> --client-secret <client-secret>

Next Steps​

The Medplum CLI uses Medplum TypescriptSDK to power the functionality. Once the external connection is working and you have tested some of the basic scenarios, it is recommended to build out your integration as a bot to enable your event driven or cron-based workflow.