Publishers and mapping to the common model

Publishers are defined as any provider system, or provider/ system/version combination that sends data to Discovery or provides an API for Discovery to use to obtain data.

Some providers have systems that have a common mechanism of publishing data. Typical examples of this are GP system suppliers such as EMIS, TPP or Vision. In this case the transformation and mapping can be standardised and used for any publisher.

Some providers have systems that do not have a mechanism of publishing data, or where they do, a particular provider may not have purchased it. In this case a transformation and mapping exercise has to be undertaken specifically for that provider. In many cases that also means a variety of source systems are involved.

These articles summarise the necessary transformations and mappings needed for each provider system.

General approach

The initial transformation in Discovery is to an extended FHIR format i.e. a FHIR model with extensions, the extensions to accomodate the many dozens of properties and data types for particular specialist systems or specialties within providers. From the interim FHIR format, a further structural and semantic mapping occurs to the common model and the data is stored in a form that can be efficiently queried and retrieved. This can be illustrated as follows: