Open Source FHIR implementations

Back to FHIR Home page

Introduction

This page lists known open source implementations of the FHIR specification. For a list of running servers, see Publicly Available FHIR Servers for testing

Reference Implementations

Note that the FHIR specification itself includes several reference implementations at [1]. The scope of the reference models included the FHIR specification itself is limited to object models derived from resource definitions or profiles, along with parsers for both XML and json, and necessary supporting code. Further code - clients, servers, transforms to other formats - is encouraged, but won't be included in the specification itself.

Note that the reference implementations are covered under a different license to the FHIR specification. For now, this is the standard OSI approved BSD license (BSD-3-Clause, [2]). The HL7 OHT license is not used because it's not on the list of OSI approved licenses ([3]), and because there is a huge component (FHIR itself) that cannot be covered under the OHT IP rules (rather a problem for the v3 tools too).

Other open source Implementations

• http://github.com/grahamegrieve/fhirserver
  • De facto reference server (runs at http://fhir.healthintersections.com.au)
  • general purpose server that implements all of the specification
  • development platform: (delphi / windows / mssql)

• https://fhir-open-api.smarthealthit.org - Josh Mandel / SMART Platforms
  • Open-source server in Grails (Java/Groovy) + Postgresql
  • "SMART on FHIR" Server: https://fhir-open-api.smarthealthit.org | Source
  • "FHIR Starter" App Launcher https://apps.fhir.me | Source

• https://github.com/furore-fhir/spark
  • Reference server built in parrallel with Grahame's to test the specification
  • Supports all resource types, searches, all operations, xml + json
  • Built in .NET with the .NET reference implementation, WebApi 2.0 library, Mongo DB for storage and search.

• https://github.com/jamesagnew/hapi-fhir - James Agnew / University Health Network
  • Open-source Java library for quickly creating FHIR Servers and Clients
  • Geared towards adding FHIR capability to existing applications (e.g. it's not a database, it's a library for quickly bolting FHIR on to your own database, or connecting to other FHIR servers as a client)
  • Supports all resource types, most operations, and both xml and json encodings
  • "Tinder" code generator (Maven plugin) creates model objects and clients from Profiles and Conformance statements

• the FHIR build tool itself is open source and includes various definitional and reasoning tools. See [4]. If you aren't signed up to the HL7 GForge, you can access the FHIR repository at [5] anonymously.

• FHIRBase - open source relational storage for FHIR with document API based on PostgreSQL. FHIRBase is an attempt to take the best parts of Relational & Document Databases for persistence of FHIR resources. FHIRBase stores resources relationally and gives you the power of SQL for querying & aggregating. At the same time FHIRBase provides a set of SQL procedures & views to persist and retrieve resources as a json documents in one hop.