FHIR Implementation Guides

Introducing FHIR Implementation Guides

FHIR is a platform specification. It describes a general set of capabilities that can be used to solve many healthcare data exchange problems. Because FHIR is used for all sorts of problems, in many jurisdictions, using a variety of architectures and information exchange patterns, the FHIR specification is very general and there are many ways to solve a problem. For this reason, implementers must make choices, and for particular solutions to be interoperable, the implementations must make the same set of choices.

FHIR Implementation guides are used to describe how FHIR is used in a particular context. Many implementation guides fit into one of these 3 categories:

1. Jurisdication Base: Describes based rules for using FHIR in a jurisdiction (usually a country specific set of rules)
2. Application Solution: Describes how FHIR is used to solve a particular problem (e.g. EHR App access)
3. Domain Guide: Describes the proper way to represent particular content in FHIR (e.g. how to properly represent the breast cancer diagnostic process)

Note that individual guides may cross categories, or not fall into any of these major categories.

Summary

This page documents the FHIR IG Publisher maintained as part of the FHIR Build Tooling. The general workflow for authoring an implementation guide is as follows:

• Getting Started
  • Describe your Implementation Guide (IG), it's scope, and it's canonical URL
    • for HL7 guides, this will be hl7.org. for other guides, it may be fhir.org, ihe.org etc
  • choose a template for your IG
  • create an initial implementation Guide resource with no content
  • set up version control for your IG
  • Build the IG using the IG publisher
    • if the github repository is public, set up auto-publishing so that the latest version of the guide is always found on build.fhir.org

• Developing Content
  • add conformance resources (see below) that describe your implementation
  • write narrative (html, xhtml, or markdown according to taste)
  • add examples, images, etc to fill out the implementation guide

• Publishing once Complete
  • milestone builds should be published to the canonical location (copying the set generated html files around)
  • the canonical location layout should generally follow the FHIR version publication pattern
  • Content to be published on hl7.org or fhir.org must be generated via the FHIR IG publisher

Typically, an IG will iterate between developing and publishing many times over it's time as it is drafted, and then consensus builds.

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Tooling Support for Authoring FHIR Implementation Guides

• FHIR IG Publisher v2 Documentation