FhirExtinguisher: A FHIR Resource Flattening Tool Using FHIRPath

Oehm J; Storck M; Fechner M; Brix TJ; Yildirim K; Dugas M

Abstract

Data analysis with popular statistical toolchains like R usually needs to be performed on {\textquotedbl}flat tables{\textquotedbl} (so-called dataframes). However, data exchange is often done with FHIR, a format that is based on a hierarchical data model. In this paper, we want to present our tool FhirExtinguisher, which tackles the problems of loading FHIR data into statistical tools by extending the FHIRSearch API with an additional projection layer using FHIRPath. This projection layer can be used to select the data elements of interest and create a CSV file, which can be easily read as dataframe by almost any statistical toolchain.