Get on your healthcare mission – Hands-on experience with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta)

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On April 21, 2023, the Open Beta Release of SAP’s new BTP service SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta), was made available.

In Thorsten’s blog post you can learn more about the benefits of the HL7® FHIR® standard and its cloud-native implementation on SAP BTP, the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta). The service allows the profiling and storing of resources according to your business and localization needs. It lets you manage health data via REST APIs and FHIR messaging endpoints and offers extensibility with custom resources, FHIR extensions, and business rules.

During the Open Beta, you have the chance to get a hands-on experience with SAP’s cloud-based FHIR server for 90 days. Our mission will support you in this endeavor.

What are missions?

To ease your first steps with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) we have created a mission in the SAP Discovery Center for you. Missions include best practices and step-by-step guidance for implementing business use cases, with well-established support from the community and mission experts - free of cost.
The goal of this mission is simple: experience the capabilities of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) and leverage them to build and deploy a healthcare application on SAP BTP.
The context is a fictitious retrospective clinical study analyzing the association of obesity and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with pacemakers. The app is a prototype selecting patients that are eligible for the study so that clinical researchers can list them based on certain inclusion and exclusion criteria.

What can you expect from this mission?

The mission will help you to develop your first app on SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) by guiding you through the implementation and capabilities of this new service. Throughout the mission, you will:

• Gain an understanding of FHIR and its importance in the healthcare industry.


• Learn how to set up SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, load your data and integrate it into your existing systems.


• Explore use cases and best practices for leveraging FHIR to drive innovation and improve patient care.


• Receive step-by-step guidance and support from SAP experts, helping you to successfully complete the mission and create cutting-edge healthcare applications and services.

How to get started?

To engage in your journey, follow these simple steps:

1. Visit the SAP Discovery Center and navigate to the mission catalog. There, search for “Build a healthcare app with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR”. As a shortcut you can simply follow this link. Click “Start mission” there.


2. Explore the mission's overview to better understand the solution.


3. Follow the steps in the different phases as depicted below.


4. Engage with the SAP Community to learn from the experiences of other SAP partners and share your own insights.

Below are the phases you can go through when performing the mission (the picture shows the first ones to give you an idea how it looks like):

First phases of the mission

• The DISCOVER phase provides you with the necessary background information on the mission, HL7®FHIR®, SAP BTP, and SAPUI5.


• In the GET STARTED phase, you are guided to configure your BTP account, create a service instance of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR and configure the necessary authorizations.


• During the CONNECT phase, you will upload sample data into our service and try out multiple queries like reading the capabilityStatement, searching for patients with specific characteristics, counting the number of patients, reading valueSets, and implementing a rule selecting patients eligible for the clinical study. This phase is a major milestone where you can experience the FHIR REST API.


• In the BUILD phase, you reach the core of the mission, which is the app development. You have two options: either build the app displaying the list of eligible patients by yourself based on sample code or simply deploy a ready-to-use app. You will also experience the extensibility features of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR by profiling, enhancing the created rule, and by displaying the patient instances complying with the new profile.


• You can lean back a bit in the GET INSPIRED phase and learn about potential other use cases, and projects going on in the FHIR community. You can also try out FHIR messaging as an advanced step.


• Finally, it’s time to CELEBRATE and share your success. We are looking forward to your feedback, to learn what you achieved during the mission and about your ideas for improvements, use cases and potential.

Through labels on the steps, you can see if a step is essential or optional and get some hints on its content.
In each and every step, you can reach out to an SAP expert when you have a question or face an issue or to the SAP community. We will help you to overcome it and to execute the step successfully.
Once you are done with a step, you can mark is as complete to keep the status if you would like to take a break and continue later.

How to engage?

We believe that the mission “Build a healthcare app with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR” is an excellent opportunity for our customers, the partners in the SAP ecosystem and independent software vendors to get a hands-on experience with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (beta).
We are looking forward to your comments and feedback – directly via the mission, via email or as comment to this blog.

Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity – join the mission today!