Natively Connect to FHIR Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for FHIR into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build FHIR-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to FHIR data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Set URL to the Service Base URL of the FHIR server. This is the address where the resources are defined in the FHIR server you would like to connect to. Set ConnectionType to a supported connection type. Set ContentType to the format of your documents. Set AuthScheme based on the authentication requirements for your FHIR server.

Generic, Azure-based, AWS-based, and Google-based FHIR server implementations are supported.

Sample Service Base URLs

• Generic: http://my_fhir_server/r4b/
• Azure: https://MY_AZURE_FHIR.azurehealthcareapis.com/
• AWS: https://healthlake.REGION.amazonaws.com/datastore/DATASTORE_ID/r4/
• Google: https://healthcare.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION/datasets/DATASET_ID/fhirStores/FHIR_STORE_ID/fhir/

Generic FHIR Instances

The product supports connections to custom instances of FHIR. Authentication to custom FHIR servers is handled via OAuth (read more about OAuth in the Help documentation. Before you can connect to custom FHIR instances, you must set ConnectionType to Generic.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to FHIR by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FHIR Source","user","password");

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC FHIR Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Patient WHERE [address-city] = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FHIR Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Patient WHERE [address-city] = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('New York'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FHIR Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, [name-use] FROM Patient WHERE [address-city] = 'New York'");
 

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FHIR data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, [name-use] FROM Patient WHERE [address-city] = 'New York'");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Id"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FHIR data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Patient WHERE [address-city] = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('New York'));
if($success)
 odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are FHIR-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.