Ontario Clinical Report Exchange (OCRE) HL7® FHIR® Implementation Guide v1.0.0

Ontario Clinical Report Exchange (OCRE) will be a new report delivery solution for the province. The Ontario Clinical Report Exchange HL7® FHIR® Implementation Guide supports implementers of digital health assets that will use HL7® FHIR® to enable submission of health reports to OCRE and defines the structure of the reports for consumption. OCRE will leverage the Ontario Health Enterprise Publish and Subscribe (Pub/Sub) solution.

Existing products such as Health Report Manager (HRM®) will leverage OCRE to enable clinicians to securely receive patient reports electronically from participating hospitals and specialty clinics.  HRM® is a digital health solution that enables clinicians to securely receive patient reports electronically from participating hospitals and specialty clinics.

A Limited Product Release (LPR) will be conducted to test out the new OCRE Implementation Guide. OCRE will seek participation from a few sending facilities (Hospitals and Integrated Community Health Services Centres) as well as recipients (EMR vendors). Future use cases for OCRE will include report delivery expansion to additional healthcare sectors as well as bi-directional report exchange.

Scope

This implementation guide is developed as part of Ontario Health's plan to facilitate the submission of OCRE data by data contributors. This IG will also be used by data consumers (e.g. EMRs, and etc) who will subscribe to OH Pub/Sub services to receive OCRE reports.

The purpose of this implementation guide is to develop guidance for using FHIR R4 standard for OCRE data submission and consumption. This aligns with the provincial DHIEX program which stipulates that FHIR will be the primary healthcare interoperability standard in health data exchange in Ontario.

The current design of this implementation guide focuses on alignment of OCRE data with Ontario EHR profiles and with Ontario acCDR and MI FHIR IGs.

Status

This implementation guide is for trial use and has gone through a formal governance committee review and approval process resulting in a balloted draft status. 

FHIR is an evolving trial-for-use standard, so additional changes by HL7 are expected. We will continue to monitor developments and assess any potential impacts and publish updates as they emerge.

*SIMPLIFIER.NET is a web-based FHIR registry built by Firely that serves as the hosting platform for the Canadian FHIR Registry sponsored by Canada Health Infoway.