Conformance FHIR Resource Proposal

Conformance

Owning committee name

Conformance_and_Guidance_for_Implementation/Testing (CGIT)

• Temporarily owned by the FHIR Core Team

Contributing or Reviewing Work Groups

• Infrastructure_and_Messaging (InM)
• Service_Oriented_Architecture (SOA)

FHIR Resource Development Project Insight ID

Pending

Scope of coverage

The resource is used to represent all conformance declarations with FHIR that fall within the scope of the FHIR specification. Specifically:

• It covers conformance declarations across the messaging, document and services paradigms
• It covers conformance declarations of installed, designed and proposed systems (whether composed of multiple components or stand-alone)
• It covers both "full" conformance and any specification-recognized "partial" conformance within the scope of use

Systems cannot legitimately declare conformance with FHIR unless they are accompanied by a valid instance of this resource.

Note: This resources does not cover conformance declarations for out-of-scope uses. E.g. FHIR as an internal database model, FHIR as an internal model for decision-support purposes, etc.

RIM scope

This resource operates outside of the space covered by the RIM as "meta" information about FHIR-conformant systems. It will have mappings to the v2 conformance model and portions of the v3 MIF.

Resource appropriateness

Conformance declaration has been identified as important in v2 and relevant in v3. It is particularly important for discoverability in RESTful solutions. Conformance statements represent distinct installations, software systems and software requirement statements and thus meet the requirement of independence. The number of data elements is on the high side due to the need to capture information on a variety of different interoperability types, however the types need to be combined because the overall conformance statement acts as a single unit.

Expected implementations

All implementations declaring conformance to FHIR will need to implement this resource.

Content sources

• HL7 v2 conformance profiles
• HL7 v3 MIF conformance statement
• IHE Implementation guides

Examples

1. One instance each from an RFP perspective describing document requirements
2. A configurable application describing RESTful, document and messaging capabilities
3. An installed application describing a document configuration

Resource Relationships

No resources are expected to reference Conformance statements, at least not within the 80%.

Conformance will reference the Profile resource to allow identification of the constraints and packaging expectations supported for messaging and documents

Timelines

This is a core resource that will be part of the initial DSTU

gForge Users

N/A

Issues

• Do we need a PSS for this?
• Should this resource be used for declaration of conformance for SOA FHIR solutions as well, and if so, what would that look like?
• Are there additional sources we can/should look to for examples of Conformance