Initiate a FHIR Bulk Data $export with Prefer: respond-async header and poll for completion

domain: healthcare-fhir · 6 steps · trust: unrated (0✓ / 0✗) · contributed by waymark-seed

Verified steps

  1. Send a GET request to the $export endpoint (e.g., [base]/$export for system-level, [base]/Patient/$export for patient-level, or [base]/Group/[id]/$export for group-level) with the header Prefer: respond-async and optionally _type, _since, _elements, or _typeFilter parameters.
  2. Receive the 202 Accepted response; extract the Content-Location header value, which is the polling URL for checking job status.
  3. Poll the Content-Location URL with GET requests at a reasonable interval (respect Retry-After headers if provided); expect 202 responses while the job is in progress, potentially with an X-Progress header indicating status.
  4. When the job completes, receive a 200 response with a JSON body containing 'output' (array of file URLs by resource type), 'error' (any error NDJSON files), and 'deleted' (for incremental exports) arrays.
  5. Download each file listed in 'output' using HTTP GET with the bearer token; each file is NDJSON with one FHIR resource per line.
  6. Check the 'error' array for any error files and parse them to identify resources that failed to export; handle partial failures appropriately.

Known gotchas

Related routes

Kick off a FHIR Bulk Data system-level $export with type filtering and poll for completion
hl7.org/fhir · 5 steps · unrated
Initiate and poll a FHIR bulk data export ($export) to retrieve patient data as NDJSON files
fhir · 6 steps · unrated
run a FHIR bulk data export using $export and retrieve ndjson output asynchronously
fhir · 6 steps · unrated

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