An interoperability key allows an external system to interact with the Linkcare Platform at system level (no necessary to init a session with user credentials). This is normally used to sync information between a Hospital Information System (HIS) and the Linkcare platform.

• app_id: Id of the interoperability key. This value is generated automatically by the API and cannot be changed. This value can be understood as the ID assigned to the external system that will interact with the Linkcare platform

• private_key: private key of the interoperability. This value is generated automatically by the API and cannot be modified to a manually chosen value, but can be reseted to a new value using the API function interoperability_key_set().
  The private_key must be kept

• name: String with the name assigned to the key.

• code: internal code assigned to the key. This code cannot be changed after the creation. It must be composed of a leading letter and a sequence of other numbers, letters and underscores (until a maximum length of 32 characters). The code will always be converted to uppercase

• comments: free text up to 512 characters.

User references and the Interoperability Key Code

The code assigned to an interoperability key is an important value related to the IDs of the patients and professionals in an external system.

In normal circumstances all the API functions that relate to persons (professionals or patients) use the Linkcare internal IDs of those persons stored in the local database. For example, when invoking the API function case_get_contact () , the parameter that indicates the case reference is an ID of the patient in the local DB.

Nevertheless, it is possible to indicate that the ID of the person refers to an external system if it is composed as a concatenation of the Interoperability Key Code and the ID of the person in the external system (separated by a pipe).

Example

Let’s suppose that there exists an Interoperability key with code “HCLINIC” and we want to retrieve information about a patient whose ID in the external system is “8sds-ss274-23”. Note that this is not internal ID of the patient in the Linkcare platform. It is even possible that the patient does not exist at all in the Linkcare platform, but we can access his information thanks to the interoperability capabilities.

If we invoke the API function case_get_contact () passing as a case reference the value “HCLINIC|8sds-ss274-23", the API will understand that it refers to an identifier of an external system and will try to connect to retrieve the information.

Interoperability capacities

See the following pages to discover more about the interoperability capacities: