Removing Patient Compartment Resources with $purge

AWS HealthLake supports the $purge operation, enabling permanent deletion of all resources within a patient's compartment. This operation is particularly useful when you need to:

• Remove all data associated with a patient

• Comply with patient data removal requests

• Manage patient data lifecycle

• Execute comprehensive patient record cleanup

Usage

The $purge operation can be invoked on Patient resources:

POST [base]/Patient/[ID]/$purge?deleteAuditEvent=true

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
deleteAuditEvent	boolean	No	false	When true, deletes associated audit events
_since	string	No	Datastore creation time	When entered, selects the starting cutoff time to find resources based on their lastModified time. Cannot be used with start or end
start	string	No	Datastore creation time	When entered, selects the cutoff time to find resources based on their lastModified time. Can be used with end
end	string	No	Job submission time	When entered, selects the ending cutoff time to find resources based on their lastModified time

Examples

Example Request

POST [base]/Patient/example-patient/$purge?deleteAuditEvent=true

Example Response

{
  "resourceType": "OperationOutcome",
  "id": "purge-job",
  "issue": [
    {
      "severity": "information",
      "code": "informational",
      "diagnostics": "Purge job started successfully. Job ID: 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012"
    }
  ]
}

Job Status

To check the status of a purge job:

GET [base]/$purge/[jobId]

The operation returns job status information:

{
  "resourceType": "Parameters",
  "parameter": [
    {
      "name": "jobId",
      "valueString": "12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012"
    },
    {
      "name": "jobStatus",
      "valueString": "COMPLETED"
    },
    {
      "name": "totalResourcesDeleted",
      "valueInteger": 1256
    },
    {
      "name": "startTime",
      "valueInstant": "2023-06-15T10:00:00Z"
    },
    {
      "name": "endTime",
      "valueInstant": "2023-06-15T10:05:23Z"
    }
  ]
}

Behavior

The $purge operation:

1. Processes asynchronously to handle multiple resources

2. Maintains ACID transactions for data integrity

3. Provides job status tracking with resource deletion counts

4. Permanently removes all resources in the patient compartment

5. Includes comprehensive audit logging of deletion activities

6. Supports selective deletion of audit events

Audit Logging

The $purge operation logs as StartFHIRBulkDeleteJob and DescribeFHIRBulkDeleteJob with detailed operation information.

Limitations

• Purged resources will not appear in search responses

• Resources being purged may be temporarily inaccessible during processing

• All resources in the patient compartment are permanently removed