Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for FHIR provides formulas that can query FHIR data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search FHIR data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following: =CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the FHIR data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as FHIRConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to FHIR data, separated by semicolons.

  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.

• ResultLocation: The cell that the output of results should start from.

Pass Spreadsheet Cells as Inputs to the Query

The procedure below results in a spreadsheet that organizes all the formula inputs in the first column.

1. Define cells for the formula inputs. In addition to the connection inputs, add another input to define a criterion for a filter to be used to search FHIR data, such as [address-city].
2. In another cell, write the formula, referencing the cell values from the user input cells defined above. Single quotes are used to enclose values such as addresses that may contain spaces.
=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Patient WHERE [address-city] = '"&B5&"'","URL="&B1&";ConnectionType="&B2&";ContentType="&B3&";AuthScheme="&B4&";Provider=FHIR",B6)
3. Change the filter to change the data.