Is there no dependency between FHIR resources in FHIR service?

Question

Hi

I am using Azure Health Data Services to push data to the repository.

I have two FHIR resources: Patient and Claim.

The Claim resource has a reference property that refers to a Patient FHIR resources.

Now, suppose if I DELETE the patient in the FHIR repo, and the claim resource that is referencing the Patient is still present.

Ideally, dependency error should pop up.
But, I am not getting any such error. Is this correct? Am I missing something here?

Kindly assist me in this.

Answer 1

@P, Pioline (Cognizant) Thanks for reaching out. The FHIR service does not enforce referential integrity among FHIR resources.

This means that if you delete a Patient resource, any Claim resources that reference the deleted Patient will not be automatically deleted or throw an error. This is by design, as FHIR aims to be a flexible model that can handle real-world healthcare scenarios. In many cases, resources may reference other resources that are no longer available or have been deleted.

let me know incase of further queries, i would be happy to assist you.

Please 'Accept as answer' and ‘Upvote’ if it helped so that it can help others in the community looking for help on similar topic