FHIR Community Process

This page documents the FHIR Community process

Organizations that follow this community process may label their marketing material, specifications, and other documentation with the "FHIR Community Process" icon. Note that other organizations may develop and publish FHIR specifications without following this process, but they cannot use the FHIR Community Process stamp of approval. Note that a variety of organizations publish FHIR specifications, each that represents a different set of stakeholders. Almost all of the organizations have overlap in membership and stake holder communities, but most have their own value proposition. The goal of this community process is define a common process that the organizations follow to ensure that the products of their work to do not clash.

Note that there may be still be competition between the organizations as they vie to represent the community; such competition is both good and bad for community - good, in that it helps keep the community honest, and bad, where the same problem may be solved with incompatible specifications.

Major open issues

• what is the relationship between this general process and Gemini?
• what is the relationship between this general process and JIC?
• what is the right way to handle relationships across countries and HL7 affiliates
• who owns the coordination committee?

The HL7 pledge

HL7 plays 2 roles in this community:

• Provides the FHIR Platform and defines the rules of the FHIR Community Process
• Acts as a FHIR Community Process Host along with a number of other organizations

HL7 pledges not to use it's role as the FHIR Platform owner to unfairly prioritise it's own standing as a FHIR Community Process Host. Note that as an open membership organization, HL7 processes in this regard are necessarily open and transparent.

Note: HL7 has not actually made this pledge at this time.

Signed up Hosts

The following organizations have committed to follow the FHIR Community Process:

• todo....
• candidates: IHE HL& CEN SNOMED Carequality CarinHealth CommonWell ONC Infoway

This means that at least some of their activities follow this process, and are published as FHIR Community Specifications

New Community work items

• looking for new work that is needed
• interacting with national authorities
• creating community process hosts vs re-using existing hosts

Proposing New Work Items

• once identified, characterise
• propose / approve the new work item via the FHIR Community Process Coordination Committee (see below)
• if going ahead, publish public notice

FHIR Community Process Coordination Committee

• Has members from all organizations that have committed to following the FHIR Community Process
• all discussions are public, but only members participate
• All new community work items get proposed via a github proposal
• discussion via email and github chat
• maintains relationships with cross-national coordinations bodies like GDPR (or is that Gemini)
• Has no power to veto work, but members commit to doing their best to minimise overlaps
• has a web site for publishing notices of initiation of committee work. Notice includes
  • References to community engagement policy / license / governance doco

Minimum Process Support

• all FHIR Community Process work items must be open to everyone to comment.
• control over issue resolution, work prioritization may be limited to paid members