Introduction to FHIR SDC

Lloyd McKenzie — one of FHIR's original editors and the SDC lead since ONC first funded the project — frames Structured Data Capture as a toolbox of supplemental capabilities on top of base FHIR Questionnaire, not a solution tied to any single use case. The talk walks through the eight areas the specification now covers: workflow, form rendering, complex form behavior, population, extraction, adaptive forms, modular forms, and form derivation.

Lloyd shows why the core production pattern — populate from existing records, capture through the form, extract into discrete FHIR resources, and link everything back via Provenance — matters more than the questionnaire itself. He explains how adaptive forms handle large instruments (1,500-question forms served one question at a time) without shipping proprietary logic to the client.

The talk closes on conformance: SDC has been under NLM funding for roughly ten years, and the next release focuses on making "I conform to SDC" a meaningful statement rather than a grab-bag of profiles.

Build production SDC on Health Samurai's stack: Formbox is a FHIR-native form platform that ships the Questionnaire lifecycle Lloyd describes — authoring, population, and template-based extraction — on top of Aidbox.