What is a FHIR Profile?

A FHIR profile is a collection of rules and constraints used to customize and refine a base Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) resource. Profiling is a vital process that adapts the base FHIR resource standard to satisfy the unique requirements of a specific use case, geographic region, medical institution, or clinical workflow.

While the base FHIR specification provides generic, flexible definitions for resources (such as Patient, Observation, or Medication), profiles transform these generic resources into more precise ones. This ensures consistent and interoperable data exchange tailored for a particular community or implementation.

FHIR is designed to cover various healthcare scenarios globally. Profiles allow implementers to adapt this general platform without losing the benefits of standardization.

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InterSystems IRIS is built on an architecture that separates the logical organization of data (namespaces) from its physical storage location (databases). Understanding this separation and the distinction between Namespaces and Databases is crucial for effective data management, security, and especially, high-performance data sharing.

In this article, I will discuss these foundational components and provide a practical guide on leveraging global mappings to share native data structures (globals) across different logical environments.

Databases: Physical Reality

A database represents the physical reality of where the data is stored on the disk. First and foremost, it’s a file in a file system called IRIS.dat (e.g., <Install folder>\mgr\user\IRIS.DAT). The maximum size of this file is 32TB. It is the container for all the actual data and the code. Databases are managed by the IRIS kernel, which handles caching, journaling, and transaction logging at the physical file level.

When you install InterSystems IRIS DBMS, the following databases are installed automatically:

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