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Fill from a FHIR server ($populate)

Instead of filling a form by hand, you can ask a FHIR server to pre-populate it from existing data — for example, pulling a patient's demographics and recent observations straight into the answers. This uses the SDC $populate operation.

Requirements

Pre-population talks to a server, so you first need a FHIR server configured in Settings — either the FHIR Base Server or a dedicated SDC server. Until one is set, the option stays hidden.

For the server to know what to fill in, the questionnaire should declare the launch contexts it expects (such as %patient) and use expressions that read from them. See FHIRPath in the builder and Extensions & SDC.

Populating

Open Answers ▾ → ↧ Fill from FHIR Server…:

  1. Choose the patient the form is about (you can search the server).
  2. The builder sends the questionnaire and the selected patient to the server's Questionnaire/$populate operation.
  3. The returned QuestionnaireResponse is loaded into the preview as the current answers, with all logic re-run on top.

From there you can review and adjust the answers just as if you had typed them, and export the response from the Save menu.

Where the work happens

$populate runs on the server — the builder only sends the questionnaire and the patient reference and displays the response. If you don't have a populating server, you can still load answers from a file (see Import & round-trip).

Next: Definition-based extraction.