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FHIR vs JSON: What are the differences?
Introduction
FHIR and JSON are related but distinct in various ways. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically, while JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data interchange format. The key differences between FHIR and JSON are as follows:
Data Structure: FHIR is a comprehensive and structured healthcare data model that defines resources, interactions, and data types, providing a standardized way to represent healthcare information. On the other hand, JSON is a flexible and schema-less data format that organizes data in key-value pairs, allowing for more dynamic and unstructured data representation.
Semantics: FHIR provides semantic meaning to the data elements through its resource definitions, enabling interoperability and understanding among different healthcare systems. JSON, however, does not inherently carry any context or semantics, as it is primarily focused on data representation rather than explicit meaning.
Standardization: FHIR is a standardized set of resources, interactions, and data types that allows consistent representation and exchange of healthcare information, ensuring interoperability across various systems. JSON, on the other hand, does not have a specific standard for healthcare information representation, which can lead to variations in data structure and semantics.
Extensibility: FHIR supports extension mechanisms that allow for the addition of custom or domain-specific data elements to the standard resources, facilitating flexibility and customization. JSON, being a data format, can also accommodate additional fields or properties, but it lacks the predefined structure and constraints offered by FHIR.
Interoperability: FHIR focuses on achieving interoperability by defining standard resources, profiles, and terminologies that enable seamless information exchange across different healthcare systems. JSON, being a more generic data format, does not inherently provide specific interoperability features or constraints.
Domain-specificity: FHIR is designed specifically for healthcare information exchange and covers a wide range of healthcare domains, including clinical, administrative, and financial aspects. JSON, being a general-purpose data format, can be used in various domains beyond healthcare and is not tailored specifically to healthcare data representation.
In Summary, FHIR is a standardized healthcare data model with structured resources and semantics, enabling interoperability, while JSON is a more flexible and generic data interchange format that lacks predefined healthcare-specific structures and semantics.
Hi. Currently, I have a requirement where I have to create a new JSON file based on the input CSV file, validate the generated JSON file, and upload the JSON file into the application (which runs in AWS) using API. Kindly suggest the best language that can meet the above requirement. I feel Python will be better, but I am not sure with the justification of why python. Can you provide your views on this?
Python is very flexible and definitely up the job (although, in reality, any language will be able to cope with this task!). Python has some good libraries built in, and also some third party libraries that will help here. 1. Convert CSV -> JSON 2. Validate against a schema 3. Deploy to AWS
- The builtins include json and csv libraries, and, depending on the complexity of the csv file, it is fairly simple to convert:
import csv
import json
with open("your_input.csv", "r") as f:
csv_as_dict = list(csv.DictReader(f))[0]
with open("your_output.json", "w") as f:
json.dump(csv_as_dict, f)
The validation part is handled nicely by this library: https://pypi.org/project/jsonschema/ It allows you to create a schema and check whether what you have created works for what you want to do. It is based on the json schema standard, allowing annotation and validation of any json
It as an AWS library to automate the upload - or in fact do pretty much anything with AWS - from within your codebase: https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-python/ This will handle authentication to AWS and uploading / deploying the file to wherever it needs to go.
A lot depends on the last two pieces, but the converting itself is really pretty neat.
I would use Go. Since CSV files are flat (no hierarchy), you could use the encoding/csv package to read each row, and write out the values as JSON. See https://medium.com/@ankurraina/reading-a-simple-csv-in-go-36d7a269cecd. You just have to figure out in advance what the key is for each row.
This should be pretty doable in any language. Go with whatever you're most familiar with.
That being said, there's a case to be made for using Node.js since it's trivial to convert an object to JSON and vice versa.
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