A structured set of questions and their answers. The questions are ordered and grouped into coherent subsets, corresponding to the structure of the grouping of the underlying questions.

To support structured, hierarchical registration of data gathered using digital forms and other questionnaires.

A business identifier assigned to a particular completed (or partially completed) questionnaire.

Used for tracking, registration and other business purposes.

Identifies the order, proposal or plan that is fulfilled in whole or in part by this QuestionnaireResponse.

Supports traceability of authorization and confirmation of action on recommendations.

Identifies a procedure or observation that this questionnaire was performed as part of the execution of.

Composition of questionnaire responses will be handled by the parent questionnaire having answers that reference the child questionnaire. For relationships to referrals, and other types of requests, use basedOn.

Indicates the Questionnaire resource that defines the form for which answers are being provided.

Needed to allow editing of the questionnaire in a manner that enforces the constraints of the original form.

The lifecycle status of the questionnaire response as a whole.

The information on Questionnaire resources may possibly be gathered during multiple sessions and altered after considered being finished. Questionnaire resources with just questions may serve as template forms, with the applicable publication statuses.

The subject of the questionnaire response. This could be a patient, organization, practitioner, device, etc. This is who/what the answers apply to, but is not necessarily the source of information.

The subject context must be known.

If the Questionnaire declared a subjectType, the resource pointed to by this element must be an instance of that type.

The encounter or episode of care with primary association to the questionnaire.

A questionnaire that was initiated during an encounter but not fully completed during the encounter would still generally be associated with the encounter.

Person who received the answers to the questions in the QuestionnaireResponse and recorded them in the system.

Need to know who interpreted the subject's answers to the questions in the questionnaire, and selected the appropriate options for answers.

Mapping a subject's answers to multiple choice options and determining what to put in the textual answer is a matter of interpretation. Authoring by device would indicate that some portion of the questionnaire had been auto-populated.

The date and/or time that this version of the questionnaire response was authored.

Clinicians need to be able to check the date that the information in the questionnaire was collected, to derive the context of the answers.

May be different from the update time of the resource itself, because that is the status of the collection and authoring. This element is optional to allow for systems that may not know the value, however it SHOULD be populated if possible.

The person who answered the questions about the subject.

When answering questions about a subject that is minor, incapable of answering or an animal, another human source is used to answer the questions.

If not specified, no inference can be made about who provided the data.

Corresponds to a group or question item from the original questionnaire.

Groups cannot have answers and therefore must nest directly within item. When dealing with questions, nesting must occur within each answer because some questions may have multiple answers (and the nesting occurs for each answer).

Identifies the item from the Questionnaire that corresponds to this item in the QuestionnaireResponse resource.

Items can repeat in the answers, so a direct 1..1 correspondence may not exist - requiring correspondence by identifier.

A reference to an ElementDefinition that provides the details for the item.

A common pattern is to define a set of data elements, and then build multiple different questionnaires for different circumstances to gather the data. This element provides traceability to the common definition.

The ElementDefinition must be in a StructureDefinition or a DataElement, and must have a fragment identifier that identifies the specific data element by it's id (Element.id). E.g. http://hl7.org/fhir/StructureDefinition/Observation#Observation.value[x].

Text that is displayed above the contents of the group or as the text of the question being answered.

Allows the questionnaire response to be read without access to the questionnaire.

More specific subject this section's answers are about, details the subject given in QuestionnaireResponse.

Sometimes a group of answers is about a specific participant, artifact or piece of information in the patient's care or record, e.g. a specific Problem, RelatedPerson, Allergy etc.

The respondent's answer(s) to the question.

The value is nested because we cannot have a repeating structure that has variable type.

The answer (or one of the answers) provided by the respondent to the question.

Ability to retain a single-valued answer to a question.

More complex structures (Attachment, Resource and Quantity) will typically be limited to electronic forms that can expose an appropriate user interface to capture the components and enforce the constraints of a complex data type. Additional complex types can be introduced through extensions.

Nested groups and/or questions found within this particular answer.

It is useful to have "sub-questions", questions which normally appear when certain answers are given and which collect additional details.

Questions or sub-groups nested beneath a question or group.

Reports can consist of complex nested groups.