FHIR R4 ClinicalImpression Library

Overview

This asset is a component of MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare.

MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare enables healthcare providers to unlock critical patient data to build a patient 360 within Salesforce Health Cloud, faster and easier than ever before. The solution includes pre-built APIs, connectors, integration templates, and prescriptive end-to-end reference architecture to bring patient demographics information and COVID-19 test results from any EHR into Health Cloud using HL7 V2 or FHIR standards.

The solution also provides a library of United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and FHIR R4 resources to help healthcare developers adhere to interoperability needs and jumpstart the development of healthcare digital transformation initiatives.

Use case covered

Assessments are often 1:1 with a clinical consultation / encounter, but this varies greatly depending on the clinical workflow. This resource is called "ClinicalImpression" rather than "ClinicalAssessment" to avoid confusion with the recording of assessment tools such as Apgar score.

Performing a clinical assessment is a fundamental part of a clinician's workflow, performed repeatedly throughout the day. In spite of this - or perhaps, because of it - there is wide variance in how clinical impressions are recorded. Some clinical assessments simply result in an impression recorded as a single text note in the patient 'record' (e.g. "Progress satisfactory, continue with treatment"), while others are associated with careful, detailed record keeping of the evidence gathered and the reasoning leading to a differential diagnosis, and there is a continuum between these. This resource is intended to be used to cover all these use cases.

The assessment is intimately linked to the process of care. It may occur in the context of a care plan, and it very often results in a new (or revised) care plan. Normally, clinical assessments are part of an ongoing process of care, and the patient will be re-assessed repeatedly. For this reason, the clinical impression can explicitly reference both care plans (preceding and resulting) and reference a previous impression that this impression follows.

An impression is a clinical summation of information and/or an opinion formed, which is the outcome of the clinical assessment process. The ClinicalImpression may lead to a statement of a Condition about a patient.

In FHIR, an assessment is typically an instrument or tool used to collect information about a patient.

Trial-Use Note: Unlike many other resources, there is little prior art with regard to exchanging records of clinical assessments. For this reason, this resource should be regarded as particularly prone to ongoing revision. In terms of scope and usage, the Patient Care workgroup wishes to draw the attention of reviewers and implementers to the following issues:

- When is an existing clinical impression revised, rather than a new one created (that references the existing one)? How does that affect the status? what's the interplay between the status of the diagnosis and the status of the impression? (e.g. for a 'provisional' impression, which bit is provisional?)
- This structure doesn't differentiate between a working and a final diagnosis. Given an answer to the previous question, should it?
- Further clarify around the relationship between care plan and impression is needed. Both answers to the previous questions and ongoing discussions around revisions to the care plan will influence the design of clinical impression
- Should prognosis be represented, and if so, how much structure should it have?
- Should an impression reference other impressions that are related? (how related?)
- Investigations - the specification needs a good value set for the code for the group, and will be considering the name "investigations" further

This library is used by FHIR R4 ClinicalImpression API.

More information about FHIR R4 ClinicalImpression specification can be found here.