I don’t know about you, but I find it frustrating to try and get complex JSON or d right when trying to build it “by hand”. There are just too many things that can go wrong: forgotten commas, unbalanced brackets, and so forth. Fortunately, JSON (we’ll focus on JSON here) is a fundamentally simple format. Objects consist of key/value pairs where the keys are always strings, and the values are one of: a string a number the special values true, false or null another object an array consisting of items of any of these types (including this one) This translates very naturally into Python, where dictionaries and lists are basic data types. To illustrate, let’s take a relatively simple FHIR resource, a condition: { “resourceType”:…
Information Technology in HealthCare
Posts tagged “JSON”
Author’s note: Since publishing this, I’ve learned that the array representation was first proposed in a joint paper by George James and Rob Tweed, A Universal NoSQL Engine, Using a Tried and Tested Technology. Given the ubiquity of MUMPS in Health IT, and the increasing use of JSON as a data format, there is a need for a simple way of converting between the two formats. But before presenting such a mapping, let us briefly review the two formats. In MUMPS, arrays are key/value pairs in which keys may be organized hierarchically. Not only are ROOT(1)=”abc” ROOT(2)=”def” and ROOT(“abc”)=”def” legal arrays, but so is ROOT(“abc”)=”d” ROOT(“abc”,0,12)=”ef” ROOT(4,”def”)=1.1 There are a few things to notice here. For one thing, numbers and arrays may be freely…
Categories: Health IT
Fast Health Interoperability Resources or FHIR (pronounced “fire”) is a relative newcomer in Health IT, and the latest generation of HL7 standards. It is also somewhat unusual in that it is being made available free of charge, and is being developed through an open process in this post I explore a few of the main concepts underlying FHIR (the “big bits”), and why it is perhaps different from its predecessors. Its current version, Draft Standard for Trial Use 2 (DSTU 2) isn’t even an official release. Yet, it enjoys tremendous popularity, and there are many early adopters, such as Regenstrief. Part of the reason for this is that expectations are high, and the time seems to be right for this technology. For example, though…
Categories: Health IT
Greg's Health IT Blog 