FHIR is an emerging standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. Searching for resources is fundamental to the mechanics of FHIR. Search operations traverse through an existing set of resources filtering by parameters supplied to the search operation. health information systems convert the clinicians’ interactions into the search string.

With the growing importance (and intelligence) of chatbots, it is possible to converse with the physician and retrieve what they want by converting their needs to FHIR search string. This can make the clinicians’ life easy as most of them do not like entering complex search terms into text boxes.

Rasa is an open-source machine learning framework for building AI assistants and chatbots. You can create custom actions with Rasa to support various use-cases. The Microsoft Bot Framework SDK allows you to create and develop bots for the Azure Bot Service. Starting with version 4.7 of the Bot Framework SDK, you can extend a bot using another bot (a skill). A skill can be consumed by various other bots, facilitating reuse.

During the COVID break, I created a couple of experimental projects to make chatting with electronic health records possible. One is a RASA project for mapping conversations to FHIR search.

https://github.com/dermatologist/rasaonfhir

The other is a FHIR search skill for Microsoft Bot SDK that more or less does the same thing.

These are experimental for now and pull requests are welcome!

Bell Eapen
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