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Published on: September 20, 2018
Reflective openEHR-to-FHIR: Java class-based generator for transforming openEHR compositions to fast healthcase
Nektarios Ladas1, Stefan Franz1, Alina Rehberg1
1Medical Data Integration Center of the MHH (MeDIC), Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany.
Health Informatics Journal
|August 7, 2026
Summary
The data integration center (DIC) developed an open-source tool to transform openEHR data into FHIR format, enabling research data sharing for the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). This robust solution efficiently processes millions of FHIR bundles.
Area of Science:
- Health Informatics
- Medical Data Interoperability
- Health Data Standards
Background:
- The university's data integration center (DIC) manages diverse data, including unstructured medical reports and structured lab data, within an openEHR repository.
- Participation in the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) necessitates sharing common consent data for research.
- A key requirement for data sharing is the transformation of data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format.
Purpose of the Study:
- To address the challenge of transforming openEHR data into FHIR format efficiently and maintainably.
- To develop a software artifact that overcomes the limitations of manual, template-specific transformations.
- To facilitate seamless data exchange for research purposes under the MII.
Main Methods:
- Designed a novel method and developed an open-source software artifact for transforming openEHR compositions into FHIR resources or bundles.
- Implemented dynamic declaration of openEHR fields to API methods for flexible data mapping.
- Enabled runtime updates for mappings and provided tools for validation by developers and end-users.
Main Results:
- The developed software artifact performs robust transformations from openEHR to FHIR.
- The system has successfully processed and stored over 30 million FHIR bundles to date.
- The solution is supportable and updatable, unlike traditional module-based approaches.
Conclusions:
- The developed open-source software artifact provides an efficient and maintainable solution for transforming openEHR data to FHIR.
- This facilitates compliance with MII data sharing requirements and supports research initiatives.
- The tool's ability to handle large volumes of data demonstrates its practical utility in health informatics.
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