In accordance with the guidelines for implementing us-core missing data, the R4 DocumentReference resource has undergone the following modifications and the changes are planned to be deployed to production on 29-Feb-2024.
1. On performing DocumentReference read by Id which does not have DocumentReference.status field, FHIR currently gives '500 Internal Server Error’ with missing required fields OperationOutcome as response. With the new change, FHIR will
a. return 404 resource not found OperationOutcome.
2. On performing DocumentReference search and there are some documents missing DocumentReference.status field as part of that search criteria, FHIR currently provides '500 Internal Server Error’ with missing required fields OperationOutcome as response. With the new change, FHIR will
a. Return 200 OK,
b. Search bundle with DocumentReference resources with valid status. Documents without status will not be returned.
c. Bundle now includes the OperationOutcome mentioning “Other search results were found but could not be compliantly expressed and hence have been suppressed” representing the documents which do not have valid status.