One post tagged with "cql"

Translational researchers, clinical informaticians, and healthcare data architects face a fundamental architectural divide: operational systems exchange deeply nested FHIR JSON, while observational research, clinical logic evaluation, and population analytics require relational tables. FHIR4DS bridges this divide with an open-standards, SQL-native analytical engine built directly on DuckDB.

Open Standards Compliance & Interoperability​

FHIR4DS is engineered for 100% specification compliance with official healthcare standards, ensuring your clinical logic and data models remain completely portable without proprietary lock-in:

1. HL7 FHIRPath — the standard expression language for navigating complex clinical trees. Enables path traversal, deep collection extraction, and polymorphic choice types directly within SQL queries over raw FHIR JSON.
2. HL7 Clinical Quality Language (CQL) — the interoperable standard for expressing computable clinical knowledge. Authors write human-readable clinical definitions — patient cohort eligibility, screening criteria, disease phenotypes — that compile directly to portable SQL.
3. HL7 SQL-on-FHIR v2 — the open community standard for defining flattened, tabular views of hierarchical FHIR resources. An interoperable, vendor-neutral method to reshape complex JSON documents into clean relational projections.
4. OHDSI OMOP Common Data Model (v5.5) — the international standard for observational health research. FHIR4DS maps FHIR R4 to OMOP CDM v5.5 tables on-the-fly, resolving concepts across standard medical vocabularies at query time without offline ETL staging.

What the compliance claim is tested against​

Each of the specs FHIR4DS implements — FHIRPath, CQL, and SQL-on-FHIR v2 — ships with its own HL7-community-built reference implementation and a test suite designed to validate other implementations. FHIR4DS passes all 2,785 of them at 100%:

Suite	Tests	Passing
CQL — official HL7 cql-tests corpus	1,706	100%
FHIRPath — official reference suite	935	100%
SQL-on-FHIR v2 — official spec_tests	144	100%
CMS eCQM measures (QI-Core 2025) — evaluated end-to-end	47	100%

The OMOP CDM v5.5 mapping library carries its own example suite (38 expected-output tests — OMOP has no official test suite), kept green in the same runner.

These are not self-authored checks where it matters: the FHIRPath suite is the one the reference evaluator runs, the CQL suite is the official HL7 cql-tests corpus, and the ViewDefinition suite is the SQL-on-FHIR community's spec_tests. Where an official suite disagrees with the implementation, the suite wins — and the conformance runner ships in the repository so anyone can reproduce the numbers. Beyond the suites, all 47 CMS eCQM measures from the QI-Core 2025 content package evaluate end-to-end (real FHIRHelpers/QICoreCommon resolution, real ValueSets, real patient data), and the OMOP CDM v5.5 mapping library carries its own example suite (38 expected-output tests — OMOP has no official test suite) kept green in the same runner.

Ease of Use: Zero Infrastructure, Run Anywhere​

• Runs directly in notebooks & Python — no JVM, no Docker containers, no server infrastructure. pip install fhir4ds-v2 and execute clinical queries inside local Jupyter notebooks, Python scripts, or automated analytical workflows.
• Zero-ETL direct data attachment — mount raw clinical data where it already lives: local/cloud Parquet, NDJSON bulk exports, AWS S3, PostgreSQL/HAPI read replicas, and MongoDB, with no pre-flattening, data duplication, or pipeline synchronization lag.
• Native DataFrame & lakehouse ecosystem — results return as Pandas DataFrames, Polars relations, or Apache Arrow tables, immediately ready for biostatistics and machine-learning pipelines.
• In-browser & zero-egress deployment (WASM) — compiles directly to WebAssembly via DuckDB-WASM and Pyodide. Run clinical reasoning 100% client-side inside SMART on FHIR browser applications — zero PHI ever leaves the user's computer.

Architectural & Standards Matrix​

Dimension	Traditional clinical engines / warehouses	FHIR4DS (SQL-native engine)
Standards compliance	Fragmented across separate tools	100% compliant: CQL, FHIRPath & SQL-on-FHIR v2
Flattening mechanism	Custom proprietary scripts / ETL staging	Standardized SQL-on-FHIR ViewDefinitions
OMOP CDM integration	Multi-stage offline batch ETL jobs	Query-time view mapping with standard vocabularies
Data storage & ingestion	Requires pre-flattened relational DB	Zero-ETL on raw JSON, Parquet & live DBs
Runtime footprint	Dedicated servers, Docker & heavy runtimes	Zero-server (Python & browser WASM)
Evidence & audit trail	Opaque summary counts & black-box logs	Traceable logic trails & clinical narratives

Tailored Informatics Applications & Workflows​

1. Query-Time OMOP CDM v5.5 Harmonization — bridges clinical care to observational research. Maps FHIR data to standardized OMOP CDM v5.5 tables on-the-fly, resolving clinical concepts across standard coding systems at query time without offline ETL pipelines.
2. Computable Guidelines & Phenotyping (CQL) — express clinical logic in interoperable CQL and evaluate it directly across longitudinal data inside your analysis notebook.
3. Zero-Egress SMART on FHIR Apps (WASM) — clinical reasoning 100% client-side in the browser via DuckDB-WASM. SMART on FHIR tools perform risk scores and guideline matching without transmitting sensitive patient records to external servers.
4. Terminology, Auto-Coding & Notes Pipeline — maps codes between code systems, automatically resolves free text to standard codes, and derives structured Condition resources directly from clinical progress notes.

The performance behind query-time OMOP​

The query-time mapping is practical because the projections ride the same vectorized engine. We benchmarked the SQL-on-FHIR OMOP views themselves on synthetic FHIR R4 (Synthea) at 1k → 10k → 100k patients — roughly 820 FHIR resources per patient, 0.9 GB → 81 GB of raw JSON — materializing the full OMOP CDM v5.5 table set (person through death, via ViewDefinitions and the composition SQLQueries) on a single workstation (13th-gen Intel Core i9-13900KF, 32 threads, DuckDB capped at an 8 GB working set). Timings are exec-only, median of 3, forced full evaluation:

Patients	FHIR resources (JSON)	CDM rows materialized	Total exec	Peak RSS
1,000	876,903 (0.9 GB)	876,490	205 s	1.2 GB
10,000	8.1 M (8 GB)	8.1 M	269 s	3.1 GB
100,000	82.1 M (81 GB)	82.1 M	35 min	8.7 GB

The scaling is the story: 100× the patients costs ~10× the time — per-patient materialization cost drops roughly 10× with scale, because a ViewDefinition compiles to columnar SQL whose cost tracks the scan, not per-record transformation. A representative composition query (drug-exposure across the 5 source resources) runs in 282 s at the 100k rung, producing 7.7 M rows under the same 8 GB cap. Nothing is staged, copied, or synchronized ahead of time — the artifacts are the small, versioned ViewDefinition + SQLQuery files, and the engine treats them as queries (full methodology in benchmarks/ in the repository).

Licensing & Community Collaboration​

FHIR4DS supports both open academic science and enterprise software environments:

• Open-source (AGPL-3.0) — freely accessible for academic medical centers, informatics departments, grant research, and open-science evaluations.
• Commercial Enterprise License — tailored for health tech companies, EHR integration partners, and health systems requiring proprietary embedding, priority support, and high-performance C++ extensions.

Install via pip install fhir4ds-v2 · Interactive demos at fhir4ds.com · Academic & commercial inquiries: [email protected]