HAPI FHIR 5.0.0 (Labrador)

It's time for another release of HAPI FHIR!

This release brings some good stuff, including:

• A new feature called Partitioning has been added to the JPA server. This can be used to implement multitenancy, as well as other partitioned/segregated/sharded use cases.

• The IValidationSupport interface has been completely redesigned for better flexibility, extensibility and to enable future use cases. Any existing implementations of this interface will need to be adjusted.

• Many improvements to performance have been implemented

• FHIR R5 draft definitions have been updated to the latest FHIR 4.2.0 (Preview 2) definitions

• The Gson JSON parser has been replaced with Jackson for better flexibility and performance

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

HAPI FHIR 4.2.0 (Koala)

It's time for another release of HAPI FHIR!

This release brings some good stuff, including:

• A new database migrator for the JPA server has been introduced, based on FlywayDB.

• A major performance enhancement has been added to the parser, which decreases the parse time when parsing large Bundle resources by up to 50%.

• Support for positional (near) search using geo-coordinates and positional distance has been added. This support currently uses a "bounding box" algorithm, and may be further enhanced to use a radius circle in the future.

• Support for LOINC 2.67 has been added

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

HAPI FHIR 4.1.0 (Jitterbug)

November 13, 2019 - HAPI FHIR 4.1.0 (Jitterbug) - It's time for another release of HAPI FHIR!

This release brings some good stuff, including:

• Structures JARs have been updated to incorporate the latest technical corrections. DSTU3 structures are upgraded to FHIR 3.0.2, R4 structures are upgraded to FHIR 4.0.1, and R5 draft structures are upgraded to the October 2019 draft revision.
• ValueSets are now automatically pre-expanded by the JPA server into a dedicated set of database tables. This "precalculated expansion" is used to provide much better performance for validation and expanion operations, and introduced the ability to successfully expand very large ValueSets such as the LOINC implicit (all codes) valueset.
• Support for the FHIR Bulk Export specification has been added. We are now working on adding support for Bulk Import!
• First-order support for ElasticSearch as a full-text and terminology service backend implementation. At this time, both raw Lucene and ElasticSearch are supported (this may change in the future but we do not have any current plans to deprecate Lucene).
• Live Terminology Service operations for terminology file maintenance based on delta files has been added.
• Binary resources and Media/DocumentReference instances with binary attachments stored in the FHIR repository can now take advantage of externalized binary storage for the binary content when that feature is enabled. This allows much better scalability of repositories containing large amounts of binary content (e.g. document repositories).

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

Also, as a reminder, if you have not already filled out our annual user survey, please take a moment to do so. Access the survey here: http://bit.ly/33HO4cs (note that this URL was originally posted incorrectly. It is now fixed)

- James Agnew

HAPI FHIR 4.0.0 (Igloo)

August 14, 2019 - HAPI FHIR 4.0.0 (Igloo) Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release features a number of significant performance improvements, and has some notable changes:

• A new consent framework called ConsentInterceptor that can be used to apply local consent directives and policies, and potentially filter or mask data has been added.
• Initial support for draft FHIR R5 resources has been added.
• Support for GraphQL and the _filter search parameter has been added.
• The ability to perform cascading deletes has been added.

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes. You can also watch the release webinar!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

- James Agnew

HAPI FHIR 3.8.0 (Hippo)

May 30, 2019 - HAPI FHIR 3.8.0 (Hippo) Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release features a number of significant performance improvements, and has some notable changes:

• A new interceptor framework has been added. Existing interceptors will continue to work, and no code changes are needed in order to use this new version, but existing interceptors can be modified to use the new framework and can then take advantage of even more functionality. Updated migration documentation will be produced in the coming weeks.
• A security issue in the hapi-fhir-testpage-overlay (the web-based testing UI that powers hapi.fhir.org and can be embedded into other applications) has been corrected. Users of this module are recommended to upgrade right away.
• The hapi-fhir-jpaserver-starter project now uses a properties file for much easier configuration. Please use this project as the basis for any new JPA Server projects, as we are deprecating the existing duplicate hapi-fhir-jpaserver-example project.
• A number of improvements have been made to the validator.

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

- James Agnew

HAPI FHIR 3.7.0 (Gale)

Feb 6, 2019 - HAPI FHIR 3.7.0 (Gale) Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release includes support for the now-completed FHIR R4 release (FHIR 4.0.0). It also brings support for Java 11, along with a big number of bugfixes and new features.

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

- James Agnew

HAPI FHIR 3.6.0 (Food)

Nov 12, 2018 - HAPI FHIR 3.6.0 (Food) Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release brings us back to our regular 3 month release cycle (although we're only two months after the last release, which was delayed more than we were hoping). This also marks the beginning of codenamed major releases. Our first codename is Food, and we will be following the popular (and admittedly unoriginal) strategy of using the next letter in the alphabet for each release.

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes. Notable changes include:

• The FHIR R4 structures have been upgraded to the latest (3.6.0) version of the structures. This marks an exciting (but pointless) milestone that HAPI FHIR and FHIR itself have the same version number!
• The JPA Server migrator tool has been enhanced so that it is now possible to run a rolling migration from 3.4.0 to 3.6.0 instead of needing to incur a long downtime while the indexes are rebuilt. See this link for details. In addition, the migrator can now migrate HAPI FHIR 3.3.0 as well. This tool now also operates in a multithreaded way, meaning that it can run migrations much faster in systems with a lot of data.
• A new custom FHIR operation has been added, allowing subscriptions to be manually triggered/retriggered. This means that it is possible to cause a subscription to process a resource in the database as though that resource had been updated, without actually updating it.
• The JPA SearchCoordinator now pre-fetches only the first few pages of a search by default instead of pre-fetching all possible results. This makes searches dramatically more efficient in servers where users commonly perform searches that could potentially return many pages but only actually load the first few.
• A new JPA sample project has been added. This sample has existed for a while, but this is now the offical "reference" project for anyone looking to get started with HAPI FHIR JPA.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

- James Agnew

HAPI FHIR 3.5.0

Sep 17, 2018 - HAPI FHIR 3.5.0 Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release is happening a little bit later than we had hoped. This release features a complete reworking of the way that search indexes in the JPA server work, as well as a new database migration tool that can be used to miograte to a new version of HAPI FHIR. Testing these features ended up taking longer than we had hoped, but we think it will be worth the wait.

As always, see the changelog for a full list of changes. Notable changes include:

• HAPI FHIR now works correctly and is tested on Java 9 and 10, and continues to support Java 8. Java 9 introduces a new module system that meant a lot of additional testing and build tweaks were required in order to get HAPI FHIR working on that platform. Future migrations do not look like they will be as difficult, and we anticipate supporting current release versions of Java as they come out.
• A new databasse migration tool has been added to the HAPI FHIR CLI. This tool allows administrators to automatically upgrade an existing database schema from a previous version of HAPI FHIR (currently only HAPI FHIR 3.4.0 is supported) to the latest version. See the command documentation for more information.
• The JPA server mechanism for indexing resources has been completely reworked to index based on complex hashes of data. This change should have no user-visible effects, but it does reduce the total size of the database and improve search performance in many cases. It also lays the groundwork for some other features we have planned, including native JPA server multitenancy and column-level encryption.
• Performance in the JPA server has been significantly improved when fetching large pages of data (e.g. search results or history operations containing 100+ resources in one page). This work comes thanks to a collaboration between HAPI FHIR and the US National Institutes for Health (NIH).
• Support for LOINC has been further improved, thanks to an ongoing collaboration between HAPI FHIR and the Regenstrief Institute.

Note that this version does not include an updated set of FHIR R4 resources. The previous versions are still included. This is because the latest resources have a number of changes that break the HAPI FHIR build in fairly fundamental ways (e.g. compartment definitions have changes to using a FHIRPath expression that requires a resource resolution, a new validation rule has been added to require narratives across the board, etc.). Work is ongoing on addressing these changes, but as a result we decided to not delay the release any further. A point release should be available soon with updated definitions.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

- James Agnew

HAPI FHIR 3.4.0

May 28, 2018 - HAPI FHIR 3.4.0 Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release brings lots of fixes and some significant enhancements. See the changelog for a full list of changes. Notable changes include:

• HAPI FHIR now supports and requires JDK 8. Support for JDK 7 and below has officially been dropped.
• The R4 draft structures have been updated to the latest versions.
• Support for LOINC has been significantly improved thanks to a collaboration between the HAPI FHIR project and the Regenstrief Institute. The HAPI FHIR terminology service now imports LOINC parts, ValueSets, ConceptMaps, and all related artifacts.
• Support for the ConceptMap $translate]]> method has been implemented, meaning that the terminology service now covers validation as well as translation use cases. Further enhancements are planned. A utility has also been added to the HAPI FHIR CLI for importing and exporting ConceptMaps as CSV files for external editing.
• Several index table enhancements have been made to the JPA server schema in anticipation of future changes that will improve performance and decrease index sizes. These enhancements consist of new columns that have been added and will be populated in HAPI FHIR 3.4.0 but will not actually be used until HAPI FHIR 3.5.0. Please see the changelog for an upgrade script that should be run.
• The HAPI FHIR CLI is now available for OSX users using Homebrew.
• The validation framework has been further harmonized so that DSTU2 resources will now also share the harmonized DSTU3/R4 validation codebase. This has resulted in a significantly more accurate validator for DSTU2 resources.
• A number of other enhancements have also been made, as well as several significant bugfixes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

- Diederik Muylwyk

HAPI FHIR 3.3.0

Mar 29, 2018 - HAPI FHIR 3.3.0 Released - The next release of HAPI has now been uploaded to the Maven repos and GitHub's releases section.

This release brings logs of fixes and some significant enhancements.See the changelog for a full list of changes. Notable changes include:

• A schema change to the JPA server has been made which will result in significantly less storage space being used and better write performance for repositories which contain a large number of resource, or larger resource bodies. Prior to this change, resource bodies were stored in duplicate in two places in the database and this has now been corrected.
  Note that a database migration script must be run for this upgrade, see the changelog for details.
• The validator has been refactored to use a single codebase across DSTU3/R4 validation which means that any fixes and enhancements will now affect both. This makes the DSTU3 validator much more complete in terms of support for advanced validation as well.
• Several significant features were contributed by the community, including native OSGi support (several HAPI FHIR JARs now have OSGi metadata included) as well as initial experimental support for ElasticSearch instead of Raw Lucene for the JPA server.
• Several enhancements and bugfixes have been made to the interceptor framework.
• Many other bugfixes and enhancements have been made as well

Note also that we are hiring! If you have an interest in helping us develop HAPI FHIR or work on implementation projects, please get in touch!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! The HAPI FHIR community continues to get bigger and bigger. Together we are transforming healthcare.

- James Agnew