fhir-marshal

The FHIR-Marshal is a light-weight and easy-to-configure validation service for HL7© FHIR Resources. The Marshal is based on Spring Boot and can validate against the FHIR base profiles and can query custom profiles from a FHIR Server. In addition, a Terminology server can be connected to validate used codes.

Exemplary deployment

A deployment of FHIR-Marshal might look like this:

                                                                                ┌──────────────┐
                                                   ┌─────────────────┐          │ FHIR Marshal ├─────┐
                                                   │ validation      │  ┌──────►│              │     │
                                  ┌───────────────►│ result store    │  │       └──────────────┘     │
                                  │                │ (e.g. logstash) │  │                            │
                                  │                └─────────────────┘  │       ┌──────────────┐     │   ┌──────────────────────┐
                                  │                                     ├──────►│ FHIR Marshal ├─────┼──►│ Structure Server     │
┌─────────────────┐       ┌───────┴─────────┐      ┌─────────────────┐  │       │              │     │   │ profile allowlisting │
│ source system   │       │     Plumbing    │      │ Load balancer   ├──┤       └──────────────┘     │   └──────────────────────┘
│ (speaking FHIR) ├──────►│ (forward CRUD,  ├─────►│ (e.g. nginx)    │  │                            │
└─────────────────┘       │  validate some) │      └─────────────────┘  │       ┌──────────────┐     │
                          └────────┬────────┘                           ├──────►│ FHIR Marshal │     │
                                   │                                    │       │              ├─────┤   ┌──────────────────────┐
                                   │                                    │       └──────────────┘     ├──►│ Terminology server   │
                                   │                                    │                            │   │ supports validator   │
                                   │                                    │       ┌──────────────┐     │   └──────────────────────┘
                                   │                                    └──────►│ FHIR Marshal │     │
                                   │                                            │              ├─────┘
                                   │               ┌─────────────┐              └──────────────┘
                                   │               │ target FHIR │
                                   └──────────────►│ server      │
                                                   └─────────────┘

Plumbing the validation into your overall infrastructure is your own responsibility.

Configuration.

To connect to the external server, the base URL needs to be added to the application.yml:

fhir:
  remote-structure-servers: 
    structure01:
      url: "https://fhir.itcr.uni-luebeck.de/fhir/"
      override-retrieve-only-active-profiles: false
    structure02:
      url: "https://other-fhir.itcr.uni-luebeck.de/fhir"
      override-page-size: 25
      auth-user: "username"
      auth-password: "password"
      
  remote-terminology-servers: 
    term01:
      "https://terminology.itcr.uni-luebeck.de/fhir/"

Deployment

The FHIR-Marshal can execute as a Java Jar or as a Docker Container. The existing docker-compose file comes with a NGINX as a load balancer and two FHIR-Marshal instances for a scaling validation.

Single Instance using Java Jar

gradle bootJar
java -jar build/libs/fhir-marshal.jar

Scaling Validation using Docker-compose

docker-compose up