FEST on FHIR : A Standardized Service Interface for Norwegian Medicines Registry

Abstract

The Norwegian Electronic Prescription Support System (FEST) is a Norwegian drugs database in XML format offered by the Norwegian Medicines Agency (SLV). FEST includes all information about drugs that can be prescribed electronically in Norway. FEST is used as a pharmaceutical data source by practitioners, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals. The Norwegian hospitals are divided into four health regions. Each region has its own drug registry, but they use FEST as a resource of drug information and take the responsibility of updating their own systems with the latest up-to-date version of FEST. Having access to one common national source of information about drugs which is always up-to-date, relevant and quality assured would allow a more efficient development of interoperable systems and solutions based on one well defined, standardized interface and protocol. Our main goal of this thesis is to automatically map FEST XML into Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR). Thereby, drug information will always become available/accessible through a REST-based service, avoiding that the hospitals have to download the latest up-to-date version of FEST periodically. Our first step is to use Java XML integration technology to automatically map FEST XML data model into a Java classes model. The outcome of this step is that all FEST data elements will be accessible as Java instances of its corresponding generated Java classes. The next step is to define HL7 FHIR profiles for FEST data and implement these profiles on a RESTful FHIR server where FEST data will be stored as instances of HL7 FHIR resources. The last step is to develop Web-based back-end components to access the RESTful service developed in the former step. As a proof of concept, we developed a front-end interface to provide web-based access to our FEST on FHIR resources, and a use case of drug-drug interaction detection was applied as well. The result of our solution is that the latest version of FEST data can be represented in terms of HL7 FHIR international standards and is always available/accessible through FHIR RESTful service. Consequently, the Norwegian hospitals may have more opportunity to develop more efficient interoperable systems by using FEST data available through the FHIR RESTful service.