Standards Selection Process
Selecting appropriate standards for a profile should go through 3 stages: Exploration, evaluation and selection.
Exploration
The Technical Committee should explore the standards landscape, including not just the usual suspects (e.g., HL7 and DICOM), but other possible standards for potential candidates. It should include in its exploration the standards identified during the profile development phase.
Evaluation
The Technical committee evaluates the standards for the following characteristics:
- Publication Status - Is it now, or likely to be by time of publication, an approved standard?
- Suitability for Use Case - Is it designed for the function that it is being used in the use case?
- Aligned with existing work - Is the standards compatible with those selected in other IHE profiles?
- Deployed - Has the standard actually been used?
- Widely Available - Are implementations of the standard sufficiently available to expect that it could be used in a product?
- No Encumbrances - Is the standard free from significant encumbrances on its use? This is not about whether the standard is free, but rather whether implementing it would require prohibitively expensive licenses to use.
Consensus
The Technical Committee comes to consensus on the proposal, voting only as necessary.
Resources for existing profiling
FHIR is a standard from HL7 that sometimes is selected as the core standard to profile. There are many organizations producing Implementation Guides (more general term for what IHE produces as IHE-Profile). There is tooling "Implementation Guide Publisher" for which IHE has [Guidance on writing Profiles of FHIR] includes the possibility to publish to a registry the existence of the Implementation Guide and thus the contained specifications. The IHE-Profiles that publish using the IG publisher are registered in these IG registries.
Two FHIR IG registries. These should have the same content in them but have different user interfaces.
There is also an analysis of all discoverable IG, based on the IG registry and also any IGs being developed on the HL7 cloud CI environment -- http://build.fhir.org/ig The analysis allows one to dig down to any constraints on a given resource. For example to determine if anyone has already constrained the "Device" resource, one can use this tool to find all the (StructureDefinition profiles) on that resource. The user-interface is not pretty, but the tool is very powerful.