Provider Connect Australia (PCA)

Provider Connect Australia (PCA) - Local Development build (v24.2.0.1) built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) Build Tools. See the Directory of published versions

Guidance

The Provider Connect Australia (PCA) service is a hosted service that is intended to assist organisations that provide healthcare or related services to maintain accurate information about their various service offerings, and to make that information available to partner services of their choice who are also registered with the PCA service (e.g. directories operated by other organisations).

There are two roles available to organisations that choose to participate in the PCA service:

• Publishers
• Subscribers

The same organisation may be both a publisher and a subscriber.

The PCA service stores service offering resources (e.g. HealthcareService and PractitionerRole and their associated Organization, Practitioner and Location resources) that are created by publishers and distributes them to all the partner services that are authorised to receive them by the publisher.

A subscriber can operate one or more partner services and the publisher must authorise publication individually for each partner service.

A publisher can either create & maintain their service offerings via the PCA portal, or they may integrate their own systems with the Publisher Agent FHIR API.

A subscriber receives copies of the resources, which one or more of their partner services are authorised to receive, as bundles of FHIR resources in response to FHIR search operations. They can search for new or changed resources on a schedule that they determine, they can also subscribe to receive notifications whenever new or changed resources are available to them.

See PCA API for more details.

Conventions

Must support

Must support is inherited by elements from their parents except in the following cases: extensions, modifier extensions and children of resource, meta or backbone element. This may be overridden explicitly. So, must support on an element

• when it is resource, meta or a backbone element, does not apply to any children;
• when it is neither resource, meta nor a backbone element, applies to all children, other than extension and modifier extension, e.g. for Observation.code it applies to id, coding and text, but not to extension;
• when it has more than one data type, profile, target profile or slice, applies to all data types, profiles, target profiles and slices;
• when it is an extension or modifier extension, applies to its children normally;
• when it is a reference with a value for reference, does not apply to the referenced resource. A resource is not an element.

In profiles that represent published organisation information, the presence of 'must support' on any data element shall be interpreted as follows:

• For a publishing system providing the data element to the PCA service: the PCA service will publish the data element to subscribing systems.
• For a subscribing system receiving the data element from the PCA service: the PCA service will include the data element if it is available. Subscribing systems are not obliged to process the data element.

In profiles that do not represent published organisation information, the presence of ‘must support’ on any data element shall be interpreted as follows:

• For a subscribing system providing the data element to the PCA service: the PCA service will process the data element.
• For a publishing or subscribing system receiving the data element from the PCA service: the PCA service will include the data element if it is available.

In all profiles, the absence of ‘must support’ on any data element shall be interpreted as follows:

• For a publishing system providing the data element to the PCA service: the PCA service will ignore the data element. If the data element is in a profile that represents published organisation information, the PCA service will not publish the data element to subscribing systems.
• For a subscribing system providing the data element to the PCA service: the PCA service will ignore the data element.
• For a subscribing system receiving the data element from the PCA service: the PCA service will never include the data element.

Third party extensions

Please note: this section and all referenced specifications are under development

In addition to the extensions specified in the resource profiles of this implementation guide (which includes PCA-defined extensions), resources retrieved from the PCA service may include additional extensions that are used by third parties to assist in their integration with the PCA service.

These third party extensions and their definitions are listed below:

Third party value sets

Please note: this section and all referenced value sets are under development

In addition to the value set binding defined in resource profiles, some published resources may contain codes sourced from third party value sets. These value sets and their definitions are listed below: