HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) R4 is the emerging standard for healthcare data exchange in Australia. The Australian Digital Health Agency’s National Healthcare Interoperability Plan references FHIR as the foundation for future healthcare information exchange, and major EMR vendors are progressively adopting FHIR APIs.
Within the FHIR R4 specification, the Consent resource provides a standardised way to represent a patient’s consent decisions. For GetConsent, this is significant because the Consent resource maps closely to the data structure we already produce in our evidence packs.
What the FHIR Consent resource contains
The FHIR R4 Consent resource captures the key elements of a consent decision: the patient, the practitioner, the scope of consent, the date and time, the policy being consented to, and the verification method. It also supports references to related resources such as the patient’s condition, the proposed procedure, and the organisation.
The resource includes a status field (draft, proposed, active, rejected, inactive) that maps to the lifecycle of a consent session. It supports categorisation by consent type and can reference the source document or evidence that supports the consent decision.
How GetConsent maps to the FHIR Consent resource
When a GetConsent consent session is completed, the platform generates a FHIR R4 Consent resource that represents the consent decision. The mapping is direct: the patient identifier maps to the FHIR Patient reference, the procedure maps to the FHIR Procedure reference, the clinician maps to the Practitioner reference, and the evidence pack maps to the sourceAttachment.
The comprehension verification results, viewing history, and signature data are all included as supporting references within the Consent resource. This means that the full richness of the GetConsent evidence pack is available through the FHIR interface, not just a summary.
EMR integration in practice
For healthcare organisations using FHIR-capable EMRs, the integration workflow is straightforward. When a consent session is completed, GetConsent can automatically file the FHIR Consent resource and the associated evidence pack PDF into the patient’s EMR record.
This eliminates the manual step of scanning and uploading paper consent forms, which is a common source of delays and missing records. It also means that the consent record is immediately available to any clinician with access to the patient’s EMR, rather than sitting in a filing room or a scanning queue.
For EMRs that do not yet support FHIR R4, GetConsent also supports document-level integration through standard clinical document formats, ensuring that the evidence pack is filed in the patient record regardless of the EMR’s FHIR maturity.
Looking forward
As FHIR adoption accelerates in Australian healthcare, the ability to produce standards-compliant consent resources becomes increasingly valuable. Healthcare organisations that adopt FHIR-based consent workflows now will be better positioned for future interoperability requirements, including cross-organisational consent sharing and patient-facing consent portals.
GetConsent is built on the assumption that consent data should be interoperable, not locked in a proprietary system. FHIR R4 is the mechanism that makes this possible, and we have built our data model to align with it from the ground up.
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