SQL on FHIR WG Meetings

The query resource, and the wider 'analytic' it might sit inside — Mar 11, 2025

Steve Munini
Steve Munini
CEO and CTO, Helios Software
Arjun Sanyal
Arjun Sanyal
Principal Antidote Solutions
Mar 11, 2025

The query resource — a simple thing nobody has written down

Arjun Sanyal
Arjun Sanyal
Principal Antidote Solutions

A resource that wraps a query and says which dialect and version it's in. I'm more interested in it as a component of something wider — for want of a better name, an analytic.

The analytic — metadata + views + queries + evidence

Package the metadata, a set of ViewDefinitions, a set of query resources, sample data and sample outputs together. Bundle all of it and you have something portable: not just the flattening, but the question and the evidence it was answered correctly.

Steve — why a grouping mechanism is needed at all

Steve Munini
Steve Munini
CEO and CTO, Helios Software

A ViewDefinition maps to one FHIR resource, but a real question of the data spans several. So you always end up with a collection of views plus a query on top before you get to an answer, and today there's nothing that holds them together.

CRMI — right mindset, different architectural level

Arjun had gone away and read CRMI, and reported back that it is designed for authoring, packaging and distributing knowledge artifacts generically — a package can hold any FHIR artifact — with its real traction today being the npm tarballs an IG publishes.

His conclusion: it operates at a different architectural level from a query resource, so it's worth taking a CRMI mindset to this work, but the two won't slot together seamlessly.