Introduction

  • 5 minutes

Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform is Microsoft's cloud solution empowering healthcare partners and organizations to develop business and clinical applications using the Microsoft Power Platform, the low code/no code solution platform.

Microsoft's Healthcare data solutions in Power Platform use many platform capabilities like Dataverse, Power Automate, Power Platform Connectors to build enterprise business applications, and they can be easily integrated with first party solutions like Dynamics suite of solutions. The fundamental goal of Healthcare data solutions for Power Platform is to accelerate development of healthcare business applications by providing reusable healthcare focused tools and components. This platform helps customers in modernization efforts, improve standardization across solutions, and reduce time to value during implementation.

Healthcare data model for Dataverse

Healthcare applications center on managing patient data. To ensure compatibility across data centric solutions, Microsoft uses the HL7 FHIR® standard as the model and built a FHIR-aligned relational data model designed for Dataverse.

The HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) is a data standard that has revolutionized the way healthcare information is exchanged. It's an open-standard data model that supports interoperability for healthcare systems, ensuring that healthcare data can be shared across different platforms. The primary features of FHIR include a set of data models for healthcare and an API specification for exchanging data with these data models.

The Healthcare data model for Dataverse contains a subset of FHIR resources needed for Microsoft and partner healthcare applications. This subset focuses on commonly requested FHIR resources and can be customized using the existing Dataverse maker portal tools. Customization may include adding columns to existing Dataverse tables, adding new tables modeled on FHIR resources, or adding custom tables that relate to the existing data model.

There are suites of tools and services that help build and interact with these APIs. For example, Azure Health Data Services (AHDS) FHIR service which is part of Health and Life Sciences data platform. The FHIR standard helps position Healthcare Data Solutions for Power Platform for enterprise interoperability needs.

Dataverse Healthcare API

Enterprise healthcare systems often require interoperability with existing systems and the Dataverse Healthcare APIs is one option that supports this requirement. As the data model is FHIR based, these API support FHIR bundle processings that include ingestion to create or update Dataverse records and writeback to create or update data on FHIR services like Azure Health Data Services.

Entity and attribute mapping rules for ingestion and writeback are configurable by system administrators, so they can be customized if you update the FHIR data model. This configuration-based transformation means that with each new addition to the data model, corresponding additions to entity and attribute maps provide integration with external systems with little to no extra development work.

Scenario

The Healthcare data model for Dataverse provides various FHIR resources which help you build model driven applications; however, it may not meet your solution requirements. For example, a FHIR resource that you require isn't part of the current solution.

This exercise provides instructions on adding a new set of tables that based on a selected FHIR resource, providing a detailed understanding of how to extend the Healthcare data model for Dataverse. You'll review the FHIR resource specification, and the conventions used in creating a relational model based on the FHIR specification.

Note

You will be using the HL7 FHIR R4 specification as this is the current model supported by the Healthcare data model for Dataverse.

Once the tables are added, you'll create the related Entity and Attribute maps that enable the Dataverse Healthcare API operations. You'll test the new tables and their related maps by posting FHIR bundles and view them persisted in Dataverse.

Personas

  • Power Platform Makers – familiar with the Power Platform and Dataverse.
    • Citizen developers – power users that can configure and customize Power Platform solutions using Power Platform tooling
    • Professional developers – can extend Power Platform solutions via code, past customization via Power Platform tooling
  • Health Care Administrators – owners that might own FHIR services and wish to build applications that connect.

Prerequisites

Other recommended Learn modules: