ART-DECOR®

Marc de Graauw, consultancy in ICT / Healthcare, Amsterdam

Sometimes there's a match made in heaven. ART-DECOR transactions and FHIR Questionnaires are such a match.

FHIR Questionnaires are the standard format to define various questionnaires used in healthcare to capture data from patients or professionals. Questionnaires aim on a more free-format data capture and storage than FHIR resources, but can still be constrained to fit a specific purpose. A Questionnaire is basically a nested tree of typed questions, i.e. a question can be a piece of free text, a true/false value, or a choice of answer options etc.

ART-DECOR® datasets are, basically, a nested tree of typed items. Sounds familiar? Datasets cover a healthcare domain, ART-DECOR transactions a particular use case. The data types supported by ART-DECOR are similar to those in Questionnaires. All in all, ART-DECOR datasets and transactions make for a fine FHIR Questionnaire Management Tool. ART-DECOR supports adding value sets with support for popular code systems such as LOINC, ICD, Snomed CT and others, making it easy to supply terminology-based answer lists in Questionnaires. And ART-DECOR has reuse built-in: no need to redefine those always/sometimes/never lists again and again. Indeed, having a good set of standardized answer options in your healthcare domain is a must-have if the data is to be used for science, otherwise comparison between data sets is hard or even impossible.

 

Figure 1: ART-DECOR features data sets with definitions of concepts like in a glossary (left) that can be used in a transaction that typically reflects a specific use case (mid box). Then it is possible to convert a transaction to a FHIR Questionnaire (orange box), either for prototyping an input form, e.g. for feed-back purposes during the design phase, or as a start for a production environment that uses the Questionnaires to build their own applications and store results in their respective databases.

ART-DECOR now supports serializing any transaction as a FHIR Questionnaire. Of course, this does not make sense for all possible transactions, but it can serve as an instant prototyping tool, and allows using ART-DECOR as a fine FHIR Questionnaire Management Tool. Beyond prototyping input forms, e.g. for feed-back purposes during the design phase of data sets and transactions, this feature can serve as a start for a production environment (commercial, scientific, clinical trial) that uses the Questionnaires to build their own applications and store results in their respective databases. Now the basics are covered, additions are planned for the near future.

If you want to test it on your own, please look at the following links to documentation and to our test suites. Any feedback is very welcome, write us an email.