How to manage profiles?

I intend to model the domain using FHIR types with the uml tool.

The domain will be modeled by a team of people, so I want to use a modeling tool. I proceed to import FHIR schema into the uml tool and am able to make changes and add my own resource. But I don’t know how to manage profiles. I’m going to create my own profile.

Can you share your own experience of how you manage your profiles. Can any uml modeling tools be used for this?

First, defining your own resources or making changes to official is non-conformant. The only body allowed to define resources is HL7 International. There is no mechanism to do profiling using UML tools, in part because most of the things you would want to do with profiles has no effective mechanism to express in UML. For example: “Constrain Condition.code such that one of the codings must be a SNOMED CT code of type ‘fracture’” or “Require that one of the name repetitions be an ‘offical’ name that includes both first name and family name”. You might be able to express the latter with some complex OCL, but it would be ugly to write - and next to impossible to translate into the StructureDefinitions that FHIR expects profiles to be published in.

1 Like

I looked through the documentation and now I understand much better that creating a new resource only makes sense if everyone understands what it is, so that they can exchange it, so you can’t create them freely. I understood how to define profiles and using uml itself would be troublesome. Thank you for helping me.