Access and scheduling of FHIR Questionnaire resource

Question

I am trying to understand how to use the FHIR Questionnaire resource, and have a specific question regarding this.

My project is specifically regarding how a citizen in our country could be responding to Questionnaires via a web app, which are then submitted to the FHIR server as QuestionnaireAnswers, to be read/analyzed by a health professional.

A FHIR-based system could have lots of Questionnaires (Qs), groups of Qs or even specific Qs would be targeted towards certain users or groups of users. The display of the questionnare to the citizen could also be based on a Care-plan of a sort, for example certain Questionnaires needing filling-in in the weeks after surgery. The Questionnaires could also be regular ones that need to be filled in every day or week permanently, to support data collection on the state of a chronic disease.

What I'm wondering is if FHIR has a resource which fits into organizing the 'logistics' of displaying the right form to the right person. I can see CarePlan, which seems to partly fit. Or is this something that would typically be handled out-of-FHIR-scope by specific server implementations?

So, to summarize:

1. Which resource or mechanism would a health professional use to set up that a patient should answer certain Questionnaires, either regularly or as part of for example a follow-up after a surgery. So this would include setting up the schedule for the form(s) to be filled in, and possibly configure what would happen if the form wasn't filled in as required.
2. Which resource (possibly the same) or mechanism would be used for the patient's web app to retrieve the relevant Questionnaire(s) at a given point in time?

Answer 1

At the moment, the best resource for saying "please capture data of type X on schedule Y" would be DiagnosticOrder, though the description probably doesn't make that clear. (If you'd be willing to click the "Propose a change" link and submit a change request for us to clarify, that'd be great.) If you wanted to order multiple questionnaires, then CarePlan would be a way to group that.

The process of taking a complex schedule (or set of schedules) and turning that into a simple list of "do this now" requests that might be more suitable for a mobile application to deal with is scheduled for DSTU 2.1. Until then, you have a few options for the mobile app: - have it look at the CarePlan and complex DiagnosticOrder schedule and figure things out itself - have a server generate a List of mini 1-time DiagnosticOrders and/or Orders identifying the specific "answer" times - roll your own mechanism using the Other/Basic resource

Depending on your timelines, you might want to stay tuned to discussions by the Patient Care and Orders and Observations work groups as they start dealing with the issues around workflow management starting next month in Atlanta.