Search refernce on external resource?

1

Hey there,

Can external reference resource be searched?

For example, let’s say I have an Observation resource and the subject property has a value of ‘http://external-fhir-service.org/some-url/Patient/123’. If a user does search with ?subject=http%3A%2F%2Fexternal-fhir-service.org%2Fsome-url%2FPatient%2F123, this should match.

However, if the user search for ?subject=Patient%2F123 or ?subject:Patient=123, should this also match? From my service, I have no context of what the base URL of that external service is.

Thanks!

2

As per http://hl7.org/fhir/search.html#reference, both of those will work. Though don’t make the assumption that the same resource will have the same id on different servers.

3

Thanks Lloyd. I wasn’t sure if that was applicable to external URLs or not when I first read the spec but I just read it again and it makes sense that the matching can be done regardless of whether it’s internal or external URL.