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Getting Started: Your First API Call

Getting started with Echidna is straightforward and doesn't require any complex setup. As a RESTful API, you can make calls directly to the server to look up, validate, or translate OMOP codes. There are many tools that you can use with Echidna. A popular choice is cURL, a free command line tool available for many platforms. That’s it. There's no SDK to download or specific client to install. This "no-fuss" approach lets you immediately integrate rich clinical terminology into your application's business logic, speeding up your development process.

Example

For your first API call to Echidna, let’s look up the concept with OMOP Concept_ID 201826. For this operation we’ll use FHIR’s $lookup operation.

Here is an example using cURL:

curl 'https://echidna.fhir.org/r5/CodeSystem/$lookup?system=https://fhir-terminology.ohdsi.org&code=201826'

You can also copy and paste the request (without ‘curl’ and the single quotes) to the address bar in your browser.

Explanation of the components in this example

  • https://echidna.fhir.org/r5/: This is the base URL of the FHIR server.
  • r5: Indicates that the request is using FHIR Release 5 (R5) standard.
  • CodeSystem: The FHIR resource type that represents a code system (a collection of codes and their meanings).
  • $lookup: A standard FHIR operation on the “CodeSystem” resource. It’s designed to look up a concept. Think of it like a dictionary lookup: you provide the "word" (the code) and the "language" (the code system), and it gives you the definition and other properties.
  • system=https://fhir-terminology.ohdsi.org: This parameter specifies which code system to search within. The string https://fhir-terminology.ohdsi.org is actually a unique identifier for the OMOP Standard Vocabularies and is not a URL or a link. It is only there to ensure that the lookup is performed in the correct vocabulary.
  • code=201826: This parameter provides the specific code of the concept you want to look up. The number 201826 is the unique identifier for a concept within the OMOP code system.

In summary, we used the curl command to ask the Echidna Terminology Server to find information for the concept with the code “201826” within the OMOP Standard Vocabularies. The server's response will be a FHIR “Parameters” resource containing details like the concept's display name, origin and other relevant properties.