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VSAC Support Center

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VSAC FHIR Release Notes

NLM released VSAC FHIR on December 19, 2017


The NLM Value Set Authority Center (VSAC), with support from the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), is pleased to announce the implementation of a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) Terminology Service for VSAC value sets and code systems.


What is FHIR? From http://hl7.org/fhir/overview-dev.html: "FHIR [created by Health Level Seven International (HL7)] is designed to enable information exchange to support the provision of healthcare in a wide variety of settings. The specification builds on and adapts modern, widely used RESTful practices to enable the provision of integrated healthcare across a wide range of teams and organizations."


The FHIR Terminology Service for VSAC Resources is a RESTful API service for accessing the current VSAC value sets and supported code systems. This service requires a free Unified Medical Language System® Metathesaurus License , due to usage restrictions on some of the codes included in the value sets.


We currently support the following FHIR Terminology Module resources and corresponding operations:


These FHIR resources can access value sets published through VSAC as well as code systems hosted by VSAC. These FHIR resources cannot access value sets or code systems hosted on systems external to VSAC and therefore not contained within VSAC.


With this announcement, we hope to engage the broader community of health terminology standards implementers and to support use cases that users bring to our attention.

Last Reviewed: October 18, 2021