When you are developing and testing a healthcare app sometimes you need more than just test data – you need a whole server to test your application against. Maybe you are building a front end application that connects to external EHR systems to show a users current medications, building an application for providers to view patient information in a certain way or a dashboard for insurance analysts to pull in large claims datasets from lots of different sources. All of these applications need an external data source to test against in the early stages of development because very few data sources are willing to share real information for development purposes only.
Luckily, there are several demo FHIR servers available on the internet for healthcare applications in development to test against. Unfortunately, these servers may vary in availability and may change hands or URLs, so I will provided the most up-to-date list of usable servers.
In this article we will focus on R4 FHIR servers as that is the most current and widely used version of the FHIR standard.
When choosing a demo server to against there are a few thing to consider:
- The rate at which the data refreshes – Most demo servers will refresh all of the data on a cadence somewhere between one day and one week. This means that you cannot use a test server to store changes to a patient as those changes will get wiped out.
- Non sign-in vs sign in – Some demo servers will allow you to hit any urls with a basic CRUD command and nothing else. Some will require you to create an account and some provide test accounts.
- Read only – Some demo servers are READ only servers which means only READ operations will work on the server. So, do not use these servers if you want to be able to test applications that MODIFY or CREATE new objects.
To check the availability of some of the publicly available servers HL7 has an uptime checker here: https://stats.uptimerobot.com/9DArDu1Jo
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