SMART Fetch
SMART Fetch extracts FHIR data from your electronic health records (EHR).
In theory, exporting FHIR data from your EHR is easy. Just do a bulk export!
But in practice, performance issues, vendor quirks, and important data not even being bulk-exportable in the first place (e.g. clinical notes and medication info) can make it more complicated.
SMART Fetch makes it easy again.
- Is bulk export too slow? SMART Fetch can fake one by searching over each patient in your cohort manually. This can be faster than a bulk export for some vendors.
- Is it too difficult to get a cohort defined on your server? SMART Fetch doesn’t need to wait for a FHIR Group to be defined. Just give it a list of MRNs to define a local cohort, and it will fetch your data.
- Does your vendor not support
_since? SMART Fetch can fake it by using per-resource date fields, to grab all resources created since a certain date. - Do you want offline access to clinical notes? SMART Fetch will download the notes and inject them as inline FHIR data, so you have them forever.
Quick Start
pipx install smart-fetch
smart-fetch export \
--fhir-url https://bulk-data.smarthealthit.org/fhir \
/tmp/export
After running the above, you’ll have a bunch of NDJSON resource files sitting in /tmp/export.
Read the rest of this guide to understand all the other things you can do with SMART Fetch.
Source Code
SMART Fetch is open source. If you’d like to browse its code or contribute changes yourself, the code is on GitHub.