I guess it depends on the FHIR capabilities of the source systems. I guess easiest for DIPS is to generate FHIR resources using Online openEHR2FHIR transformer
And ask the ICU verdor to work with those
But this works for specific resources only. So if you have other data like medications it will not be considered proper FHIR.
Also if the ICU already support specific FHIR profiles, very likely, they will want you to use those. Since conforming to new FHIR profiles is costly, especially for non openEHR vendors.
For this use case FHIR connect is recommended. For this to work you define mappings between openEHR archetypes/templates and FHIR resources (conforming to profiles). More mapping work for you. But more flexible to map new datapoints from archetypes in FHIR. And you will need a data transformation engine to work on the mappings. E.g. open-FHIR.com.
But I do not think it’s a way to create profiles if they are not there now, so you may need to do this manually. @jake.smolka do you know?
We did a similar integration using openFHIR from a source ehr that only supported FHIR, to Better openEHR at RSO Zuid-Limburg files here: RSO-ZL-clinical-models/local/fhirconnect at main · RSO-Zuid-Limburg/RSO-ZL-clinical-models · GitHub
It worked well but only proof of concept level. @gandrejc could share more technical experience.
Doing full openEHR integration will be hard for the ICU vendor I guess. You could use generic entries to accept their source data with little validation. Still serious work for them. And then the challenge is mapping and transforming to your vital signs template. You need both a mapping spec and a transformation engine, no one ever build afaik.
Now utopia for openEHR in my view would be the ability to create APIs for specific templates. So e.g. a /vital signs endpoint. Where the model (templates + archetypes + RM) is expressed as OpenAPI. This may theoretically be doable to generate with little manual work. And there are tools for many programming languages to work with models in OpenAPI, which would make it easy (but still laborious) to map the ICU data to the OpenAPI model and post that to the vital signs endpoint. Then you still have to build a transformer from the OpenAPI model to the regular template. But this would be doable.
And this would be very valuable for openEHR front end apps as well, especially template specific ones.