Playing With FHIR: How Many Ways Can You Read JSON Data in SAS® Viya®? Q&A, Slides, and On-Demand Recording
Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn how to use both SAS and Python to make RESTful API calls to retrieve data sets and parse FHIR-conformant JSON data, all from within SAS Viya.
Watch the webinar
You will learn how to:
- Retrieve data from RESTful APIs using requests written in both Python and SAS.
- Use the JSON libref engine or Python JSON parsers to read and interpret complex JSON data sets.
- Read and interpret data sets that are conformant with the HL7 FHIR standard using SAS and Python.
The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.
Q&A
Aloha. Can you talk, for a quick second, about security between those data exchanges?
FHIR does not define the security required to make connections between endpoints, however they do allow for the flexibility to use a variety of security protocols. This, https://build.fhir.org/security.html, is going to be the best source for seeing how to incorporate those protocols within FHIR.
Has there been any work on integrating with FHIR servers that represent the data in XML or TTL instead of JSON?
The demo in the webinar highlights how to utilize the JSON Engine, there is also a SAS XML engine which could easily be used to get the same results for both the xml and RDF/Turtle FHIR formats.
How exactly can SAS support incremental load of data which can be huge in volume? Basically, is there a concept of having a cron job equivalent through which we can pull the delta data from FHIR server?
There are a number of ways to schedule jobs within SAS products. As for the delta component, there a few ways to deal with this, but it would always require there to be a referenceable base which adds complications no matter what. FHIR helps with this in some ways, as it gives the flexibility to only pull back specific data based on set filters. SAS helps further by being able to check an even smaller subset to look for the deltas.
Hi thank you both! I was wondering how this method with FHIR/SAS Viya can also help hospital operations? i.e., physician preference cards in an electronic format
One of the joys of FHIR is that as it gets more adopted there will be more use cases. There are new applications being released daily that take advantage of FHIR, so while we do not have specific examples for hospital operations that does not mean they do not exist; it is more likely we have not encountered them yet.
What do you anticipate as the major limitations of FHIR?
FHIR is like a computer science project. It's very difficult to understand all of what we've talked about - JSON, API calls, the end user. This is often the case, right? The end user, who is a healthcare professional, has an increasingly difficult time accessing some of these more technically involved methods for approaching interoperability. The more that we ramp up the degree of technical sophistication, the more we potentially can alienate some of our healthcare experts from having a direct impact in the field because the data is harder to get to. I'd say one of the major limitations of FHIR is making sure that there's a proliferation of software vendors, thought leadership, resources, etc. to help democratize and help folks understand, especially healthcare practitioners today, what FHIR does, why it's useful, and how to really unpeel that onion and get to the data that they need to do their analytics work. We hope this is a good primer for starting that journey for many of you if you haven't started already.
Can you provide the link to the website Seth mentioned about fake data generator?
https://synthea.mitre.org/
https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea/wiki/Basic-Setup-and-Running
What's the best SAS documentation to check out for using SAS for working with API calls, especially anything with Azure?
https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Calling-REST-API-s-from-SAS-Using-proc-http-t...
Recommended Resources
SyntheticMASS HL7 FHIR API
HL7 FHIR Specification Documentation
May 2020 CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule (CMS-9115-F)(85 FR 25510)
Moving from SAS®9 to SAS® Viya®
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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