hl7-fhir

FHIR: how to model pharmacy medicine supply


Is there any way I can manage the medicine supply of a pharmacy with FHIR?

Use case: a pharmacy doesn't have a type of medicine but it can search for other pharmacies nearby for that medicine.


Solution

  • FHIR isn't currently set up to support inventory management (i.e. keeping track of who has what stock of what product). The belief so far has been that there's nothing healthcare-specific about such use-cases and therefore it falls outside of FHIR's scope. However, it could be argued that there are a number of healthcare-specific use-cases to tracking things like vaccine supplies, rare/expensive medications, blood units, etc. for purposes of managing scarce resources across the healthcare system that is different than typical inventory management. As such, you're certainly free to propose adding resources to handle this to FHIR's scope. (Use the 'propose a change' link at the bottom of any page in the spec.) In the interim, you may need to cobble something together using List or perhaps Basic.