Records

##Record Basics The overall objective of Synthea is to produce synthetic health records from generated patients. Synthea accomplishes this by keeping track of a barebones record for each patient throughout it's generation. All record-related code can be found in the folder lib/records with the exception of patient information such as birthdate, race, ethnicity, sex, etc. These are instead stored in an attributes hash for each person object. Related code can be found in lib/entity/entity.rb.

###Synthea Record The class for the Synthea record can be found in lib/records/record.rb. All information is stored in the form of simple hashes and arrays:

• @patient_info - an attributes hash that contains keys :deathdate and :expired to track if the patient is dead and the time of death
• @present - a hash that references a resource hash in one of the below arrays. For example, @present[:diabetes] yields the hash corresponding to diabetes in @conditions. This hash allows for easy lookup to determine if a patient has a certain condition, as well as modification of the condition. Procedures and conditions are being tracked by this hash.

The following are arrays of hashes with each hash containing information on a single instance of the resource

• @encounters - Each hash is an encounter
• @observations - Each hash is an observation or diagnostic report
• @conditions - Each hash is a condition
• @procedures - Each hash is a procedure
• @immunizations - Each hash is an immunization

The resources appended to these arrays should be appended throughout the patient generation process, such that the array contents are always sorted in chronological order.

The functions in this class are called in the modules wherever it is appropriate to write to a patient's record. Refer to these functions when writing calls to them and passing in the appropriate information. The fhir_method and ccda_method parameters determine the method in lib/results/fhir.rb or lib/results/ccda.rb that will be called respectively when processing the resource. A symbol that is the name of the fhir/ccda method should be passed in as the arguments for these parameters.

###FHIR Record

The FHIR Record uses the FHIR Client gem from Crucible to generate a FHIR Record object in Ruby which is exported to JSON format afterwards.

self.convert_to_fhir (entity) can be called to generate the FHIR record for a patient. This function creates a new FHIR Bundle object, creates the FHIR Patient object, and then loops through the arrays in the Synthea record. Encounters are processed to the FHIR record one at a time. When an encounter is processed, all the other unprocessed events/resource in procedures, conditions, observations, and immunizations that occur before the encounter are written to the FHIR record. This simulates the diagnoses and recording that takes place during medical encounters.

The 'fhir' key for a resource should be associated with a symbol that is the name of the appropriate method that will correctly process the resource.

###CCDA Record The CCDA Record uses the health-data-standards gem to generate a CCDA Record object in Ruby. The record can be exported into an XML or HTML format afterwards.

self.convert_to_ccda(entity) can be called to generate the CCDA record for a patient. The function works exactly the same as self.convert_to_fhir(entity) described above.

The 'ccda' key for a resource is associated with a symbol that is the name of the appropriate method that will correctly process the resource.