Conformance FAQ

Does anyone have an example of an FAQ focused on newcomers from some other technology domain?

The outline below is a skeleton. But it would be better to adopt a conventional FAQ format.

Introduction - What are the basic concepts of conformance in HL7 v2.5?

• What is Conformance and Validation, what is a Message Profile, a Conformance Statement, etc.

What are the current normative documents?

• Conformance using Message Profiles, section 2.12 in the approved v2.5 standard (July 2003) The message profile schema and DTD in section 2.19 are also normative.
• V2.xml document

What tutorials or other documents are useful for newcomers

• HL7 Conformance Tutorial dated October 2001 by Ioana Singureanu and Mary Ann Juurlink, seeHL7 Canada archive
• Version 2 Messaging Conformance (tutorial) dated May 2006 by Abdul-Malik Shakir (?contact him for availability)

What are some apabilities of message profiles?

• Can message profiles be used with both ER7 and XML encoding?
  • ??
• Can message profiles require or constrain the use of v2 extensibility features (z-segments, etc.)
  • ??
• Can message profiles constrain use of hierarchal data elements (e.g., components and subcomponents in complex data types)?
  • ??
• How do length parameters in message profiles interact with muti-byte character sets?
  • ??
• How do message profiles interact with Value Sets?
  • ??

What tools are available to perform validation?

• See HL7API on Sourceforge (Are the references on this page up to date? Who maintains it?)
• MWB, Symphonia, Chameleon, Neotool, HL7 Connect. MWB and Symphonia are known to support the HL7 defined conformance profile (XML file) specification.

Where can I find examples of HL7 confomance statements?

• (Enter "HL7 conformance statement"in any search engine.)

Where can I find examples of message profiles

• ADT examples from Jenni in HL7 registry
• examples from HL7 Germany (Frank)
• examples from Abdul-Malik's work in California
• other examples ... Australia? Canada?
• example of human-readable "interface spec"

How do I create a message profile (especially the static definition)?

• (can use MWB to create; XSLT or similar to produce human-readable "interface spec")
• The Symphonia toolkit has a build in option of generating documentation.

How do I register a message profile with HL7?

• see users guide on hl7 web site

Is there a profile for the HL7 v2.5 standard?

• ???

What additional conformance capabilities are being balloted in v2.6?

• (is there a list in the v2.6 ballot draft?)

What additional conformance practices are being considered for upcoming versions (v2.7 and beyond)?

• See the working draft of the Conformance Implementation Manual