A FHIR R4 Data Architecture for Traditional Medicine Clinical Documentation: Representing Ayurvedic Observations as Computable Resources with SNOMED CT and ICD-11 TM2 Terminology Binding
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Practitioners of Ayurveda and other traditional medicine systems perform dense multimodal clinical assessment at every consultation, routinely recording twenty or more observational markers per encounter. Almost none of this survives in computable form. Conventional electronic health records provide no data model for constitutional assessment, pulse quality, or tongue morphology, and where documentation occurs it is unstructured free text. This note describes a production data architecture that represents these observations as HL7 FHIR R4 resources, with symptom terminology bound to SNOMED CT and diagnostic terminology bound to WHO ICD-11 Traditional Medicine Module 2. It describes the profile design, the dual-coding strategy required to make traditional medicine diagnoses interoperable with conventional classification, and the implementation as deployed. The architecture is offered as a starting point for the traditional medicine implementation guide that HL7 does not currently publish.
Author: Gajjar, Sanket
Language: English
Subfield: Health Information Management
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204937750
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