S4S Discovery Application Server

The Sync for Science (S4S) Discovery App is an open-source, consumer-focused, experimental reference application being developed to help patients visualize clinical data delivered from FHIR-based APIs (nominally from provider patient portals). The data delivered into Discovery include, but are not limited to, the data required under Meaningful Use Stage 3, the Common Clinical Data Set (CCDS), and access to payor data, including the CMS Blue Button claims and benefit data.

Discovery has been developed by the Sync for Science (S4S) project (http://syncfor.science) at Harvard Medical School/Department of Biomedical Research with federal funding provided from CMS and NIH through the All of Us Research Program.

S4S Discovery Features

Retrieval of structured clinical data from multiple FHIR servers or via the S4S Procure App.
User selection of record types, provider sources, and time frame.
Annotation support to create, edit, view, and remove notes for each item of data.
Four data views:
- Summary View lists basic data for the patient
- Catalog View lists patient’s unique clinical data by type
- Compare View shows which providers have records of patient’s unique clinical data
- Timeline View shows patient’s detailed clinical and payer data over time

S4S Discovery Components

The S4S Discovery application consists of the following components:

The Discovery FHIR Demo Data Providers [https://github.com/sync-for-science/discovery-FHIR-data]
The Discovery Data Server [https://github.com/sync-for-science/discovery-data-server]
The Discovery Application Server (this package) [https://github.com/sync-for-science/discovery]

This package sets up the S4S Discovery Application Server.

All three packages can be installed on the same Linux instance, but the DNS/IP addresses for each component's instance must be known/determined before installation.

Installation of the Discovery Application Server

Verify the target system is current:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Clone this repository:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/sync-for-science/discovery
cd discovery

Run the install.sh script (you must have sudo privileges):

./install.sh

The install script will request the following:

The DNS/IP address of the Discovery Data Server

The Procure application [https://github.com/sync-for-science/procure-wip] will also be installed.

Adding support for postcss-import and postcss-insert

The package uses two postcss plugins not yet supported by Create React App:

postcss-import [https://github.com/postcss/postcss-import]
postcss-insert [https://github.com/JoeCianflone/postcss-insert]

This is (currently) accomplished by hand-editing ./node_modules/react-scripts/config/webpack.config.js after running the install script. Note that upgrading react-scripts after installation will require reapplying this edit. Edit the file to add the two plugins as follows:

  .
  .
  .

  // Options for PostCSS as we reference these options twice
  // Adds vendor prefixing based on your specified browser support in
  // package.json
  loader: require.resolve('postcss-loader'),
  options: {
    // Necessary for external CSS imports to work
    // https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/2677
    ident: 'postcss',
    plugins: () => [
      require('postcss-flexbugs-fixes'),
      require('postcss-preset-env')({
        autoprefixer: {
          flexbox: 'no-2009',
        },
        stage: 3,
      }),
      require('postcss-import'),            <--- ADD THIS LINE
      require('postcss-insert')             <--- ADD THIS LINE
    ],
    sourceMap: isEnvProduction && shouldUseSourceMap,
  },

  .
  .
  .

Checking Status

Use a web browser to access the Discovery and Procure applications at the DNS/IP address of this instance: