FHIR Questionnaire tools from the National Library of Medicine

Paul Lynch walks through the suite of open-source questionnaire tools NLM has been building since 2017: the NLM Form Builder for authoring, LHC-Forms as a rendering widget, the SDC Questionnaire SMART app for end-to-end integration testing, fhirpath.js (originally a joint effort with Health Samurai), the Clinical Table Search Service for fast terminology lookup, and a UCUM validation library.

In the demo, Form Builder imports from LOINC, a local file, or a FHIR server, configures answer lists via SNOMED ECL, sets skip logic through enableWhen or enableWhenExpression, adds rich-text formatting, and validates the resulting JSON against R4 or R5. LHC-Forms is an Angular-based web component that can be dropped into any framework via link and script tags or installed as an npm package; it handles rendering, pre-population, and QuestionnaireResponse extraction, and is available on a CDN with pinned versions.

The SDC SMART app connects to a FHIR server and demonstrates observation-based pre-population and extraction end to end — designed to be used as a starting point rather than a black box. Paul closes on where questionnaire tooling is heading in the agentic era: visual builders still have a place today, but AI-generated forms are a real possibility within a few years.

Beyond the NLM stack: if you need SDC-native form authoring wired directly into a FHIR server and CDN-hosted rendering, Formbox pairs Aidbox with a production-ready Questionnaire builder — usable alongside LHC-Forms or as a full replacement.