Clinical Codes

Some FHIR resources uses clinical codes from different coding system like e.g. FEST or ATC. A coding system (kodeverk) is a group of codes which documents clinical information in an electronic patient journal (EPJ), like e.g. diagnoses, test results or drugs (legemiddel). Codes and coding systems are therefore an important part of the critical-information domain.

Client Responsibilty

The critical-information API does only rudimentary validation of the the clinical codes a client sends, i.e. min/max length and whitelisted characters. The reason for this is to avoid that the codes used on our side get out of sync with the codes used on the client side which in turn causes errors.

This means that we require that clients send us a valid code for the coding system it belongs to. This will ensure good data quality. The clients must therefore keep track of the codes and coding system they use.

Whether to allow old or inactivated codes are up to the clients to decide, but we encourage the clients to keep the codes continuously up to date.