Extensive Conformance Testing and Validation of FHIR Data Exchange Variabilities

Abderrazek Boufahja, Tanmay Verma

2025

Abstract

The emergence of FHIR® standard during the last years was accompanied with the development of many FHIR® servers, some of them are commercials, and many are open-source projects, with a wide deployment in production. The FHIR® standard defines a complete RESTful API allowing access and sharing of clinical resources participating in dozens of healthcare workflows. The defined API comes with a complete list of variations in CRUD operations and in search queries. For instance, every search parameter comes with multiple searching flavours, making the implementation of the hundreds of search parameters complex, and the servers capability claims hard to verify by FHIR® clients, especially for those who use edge search capabilities. In this paper, we used a method to test exhaustively the large number of variabilities in the RESTful FHIR® API that can be implemented by a FHIR® server, by generating thousands of test scripts, using directly the formal description of the FHIR® standard. The method allows validating the different search variabilities and brings a deep view of the capabilities of the tested FHIR® servers. An implementation of the method was experimented, and the generated scripts were tested with multiple FHIR® servers. The testing of different FHIR® servers highlighted the conformance of most of them to the FHIR® standard, even if some discrepancies between the claims of some FHIR® servers and their current implementations were observed and analysed. We concluded the paper with an analysis of the search variabilities with commonly found behaviours and limitations. The overall work highlights the importance of a complete and strong testing strategy for a better integration and patient care.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Boufahja A. and Verma T. (2025). Extensive Conformance Testing and Validation of FHIR Data Exchange Variabilities. In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-731-3, SciTePress, pages 297-307. DOI: 10.5220/0013370000003911

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf25,
author={Abderrazek Boufahja and Tanmay Verma},
title={Extensive Conformance Testing and Validation of FHIR Data Exchange Variabilities},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF},
year={2025},
pages={297-307},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013370000003911},
isbn={978-989-758-731-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: HEALTHINF
TI - Extensive Conformance Testing and Validation of FHIR Data Exchange Variabilities
SN - 978-989-758-731-3
AU - Boufahja A.
AU - Verma T.
PY - 2025
SP - 297
EP - 307
DO - 10.5220/0013370000003911
PB - SciTePress