FHIRlink connector
Microsoft’s public preview of our FHIRlink Power Platform connector is now available. FHIRlink is a first-party Power Platform connector developed by Microsoft’s Health and Life Sciences team that enables Power App developers to build low-code, no-code applications that interact directly with FHIR compliant REST APIs.
The healthcare industry is rapidly moving to adopt the emerging HL7 FHIR® standard. FHIR defines an extensible data model with standardized semantics and data exchange that enables interoperability and rapid exchange of data in applications.
Microsoft’s Health and Life Sciences team offers the Azure API for FHIR as part of Azure Health Data Services, which is a full implementation HL7 FHIR APIs. Power Platform also includes some FHIR inspired solutions with the Healthcare Data Model for Dataverse that allows customers and partners to build healthcare focused model driven apps on a FHIR standards based relational system.
Some teams require building Power Apps directly accessing FHIR services rather than moving or syncing data between platforms.
FHIRlink reduces complexity in authenticating to these FHIR services, constructing FHIR based API calls, and working with resulting FHIR JSON data, all removing the need for custom, single-use integration solutions. Because developers can build their apps directly against the FHIR services, they reduce the complexity and cost of mapping, transforming, and synchronizing data between systems.
Power Platform Connectors
Because FHIRlink is released as a Power Platform connector, developers see the benefits of first-party connectors such as ease of support by Microsoft. Other benefits customers see from the Power Platform connector infrastructure are governance through automated DLP polices, access control with Azure Active Directory, and monitoring from the Power Platform admin console.
Using the FHIRlink connector, developers can build Power Platform canvas apps, Power Automate flows, and Azure Logic Apps that connect directly to FHIR services and integrate with many available connectors. Each service offers a various tools for working with REST services and related JSON data. You may build simple, targeted apps that leverage only FHIRlink, connected apps using first-party connectors like Microsoft Office and Teams for communication and collaboration, or data centric apps connecting FHIR services to SQL Server databases.
Preview Features
FHIRlink’s preview version supports multiple authentication options for FHIR services for flexibility and enhanced security. The following services are available in the public preview release:
- Azure API for FHIR - Microsoft’s FHIR services for management of clinical data hosted in Azure.
- Google Cloud Healthcare API -FHIR services for management of clinical data.
More options will be available in later releases of the FHIRlink connector.
FHIRlink supports several operations on the FHIR service endpoint. Each operation includes parameters that align with the FHIR specification, such as filtering, sorting, or include statements. FHIRlink’s operations construct FHIR compliant REST calls, so one set of operations should work no matter the FHIR service. This means you can build a single Power App that works even if you change the connection reference to a different service.
Some key operation examples available for building Power Apps or Azure Logic Apps:
- List Resources – retrieve a full list of available records for a particular FHIR resource type. For example, you may want to retrieve a list of Appointment records for a given Patient.
- Get a Resource – Get a single record for a type of FHIR resource using the FHIR Id. This will return the full FHIR JSON.
- Create a Resource – post a JSON payload to the FHIR service that represents a new FHIR record in the target service.
You can review the full list of available operations at the FHIRlink landing page.
We welcome your feedback for this preview release of the FHIRlink connector. Watch for upcoming posts over the next few months diving into some real examples on how to leverage FHIRlink to build healthcare applications on the Power Platform.