EasyShare SMART Health Links (SHL)
The EasyShare module implements the SMART Health Links (SHL) specification, which can be used to provide an easy mechanism for health data sharing without any existing system-to-system connections.
SMART Health Links use a special QR code which is intended to be held and displayed by the patient, and scanned by a clinician who requires access to the health data contained within the link.
The SMART Health Link specification envisions usage for any arbitrary FHIR payload, but the current implementation in Smile CDR is specifically designed to be used for sharing International Patient Summary documents.
SMART Health Links allows a user to share health information with another user by displaying and scanning a QR code.
Although there are many use cases that could be enabled by this specification, the typical use case consists of a Patient (or their delegate) presenting a SHL QR code to a clinician, allowing them to easily provide access to their health information.
In a typical example of this flow, a Patient uses a mobile application to request and display a SMART Health Link (SHL), which is represented as a standard QR Code. EasyShare has an API which can be used to generate this QR code, using a FHIR payload as input.
The request to fetch an IPS document and create a new SHL QR code for it could be performed directly by the mobile application, or could be mediated by a backend application working with the Smile CDR APIs.
This request could also happen ahead of time, or could happen on demand when the patient needs it. The data associated with any SHL QR Code is stored in a dedidated database schema by the EasyShare module.
SMART Health Links provide two mechanisms to access the data contained within them, as shown on the diagram below:
The following diagram shows the overall architecture for the EasyShare modules for SMART Health Links support.
EasyShare SMART Health Link support is enabled by two modules in Smile CDR:
Because they grant access to health data, SMART Health Links are very sensitive documents. They rely on the principal that the user who holds the QR code must treat it as a sensitive document (like they would if they were holding a physical copy of their health record) and only show it to someone that they trust to view the information.
SMART Health Links have two useful security features which can be helpful in designing a secure SHL-based exchange: