I should clarify my shorthanded summary:
What I meant was:
Patient with No Known Allergies
This is not the same as unknown allergy information. Someone has explicitly confirmed that the patient does not have any known allergies – i.e., allergy information is known, there just aren’t any allergies. In this case, we have a known list of allergies that is an empty list.
curl -i /patient/d8f598df-6f24-4434-845b-0849f2360dc3/allergies
HTTP/1.1 202 OK
[]
Patient with allergies
Surprise, surprise. We return a list of allergy resources.
curl -i /patient/d8f598df-6f24-4434-845b-0849f2360dc3/allergies
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[
{
# allergy resource #1 here
},
{
# allergy resource #2 here
}
]
Allergies unknown
This is not “no known allergies.” We do not have any information about the patient’s allergies. They might be allergic to something; they may not have any allergies. Returning an empty list would be misleading. Our clearest response is to say the allergies resource does not yet exist for this patient.
curl -i /patient/d8f598df-6f24-4434-845b-0849f2360dc3/allergies
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found