Technical Framework Publication Process

Note that a new version of this document with additional details on process requirements is currently under development and review. You can review the draft document here.

The Technical Committee of each Domain is responsible for preparing documents (Technical Framework Volumes, Supplements, Change Proposals, white papers, etc). Each document must have at least one designated author and two designated reviewers. Review and approval by the full technical committee is required before each publication stage.

Public Comment

Supplement documents are published initially in a draft for public comment. The minimum public comment period is 30 days. A general invitation for public comment is issued on the initial date of publication. All comments received are to be reviewed, addressed and dispositioned by the committee. Details on the Public Comment Process are available here.

Trial Implementation

Once all public comments are addressed, supplement documents are published for Trial Implementation. Trial Implementation documents are used for testing at Connectathons and other IHE testing and demonstration activities. Testing events are used to gather feedback and frequently result in changes to a published supplement. A supplement may remain in trial implementation status for a number of cycles and be republished in a number of revisions before being advanced to final text status.

Final Text

When a committee determines that a supplement has passed through a sufficient amount of successful Connectathon testing, all known issues have been addressed and both the supplement and its underlying standards are judged to be sufficiently stable, it should be advanced to Final Text status and incorporated into the domain's Technical Framework document. The process for reviewing a technical framework supplement to consider advancing it to Final Text is available here.

General Procedures

Documents will be scheduled for a needed for Publication date range by IHE Staff. Within that date range, documents are accepted on a First In/delivered First Out (FIFO) basis for editing and publishing by the IHE Publication Staff. If a Domain misses its assigned submission date, the document will go to the end of the publication queue. This could result in inadequate time for a Public Comment Period, missing the F2F comment review meeting, missing the Trial Implementation delivery date, and, subsequently will not be tested for a specific Connectathon.

The Secretariat for each Domain is responsible for publication of the documents on the IHE website.

Handling of the documents is coordinated on the IHE FTP Server in the DocumentPublication folder.

Details on proper usage of those FTP folders is provided in the ReadMe document. READ IT BEFORE DOING ANYTHING IN THOSE FOLDERS.

An inventory of published IHE documents can be found here.

Document File Naming

The file naming convention for IHE Technical Frameworks should be as follows:

IHE_[Domain Abbreviation]_TF_[Rev. # "x.x"]_[Vol. # "n"]_[ISO formatted date]

Example: IHE_ITI_TF_Rev7.0_Vol1_2010-08-10.pdf

The file naming convention for supplements should be as follows:

IHE_[Domain Abbreviation]_Suppl_[Title Abbreviation]_[Rev. # "x.x"]_[Publication Status PC/TI/FT]_[ISO formatted date]

Example: IHE_RAD_Suppl_BIR_Rev1.1_TI_2010-11-16.pdf

The file naming convention for white papers should be as follows:

IHE_[Domain Abbreviation]_White-Paper_[Title]_[Rev. # "x.x"]_[ISO formatted date]

Example: IHE_QRPH_White-Paper_Performance_Measure_Data_Element_Structured_for_EHR_Extraction_Rev1.0_2008-06-10.pdf

See Also

Writing Technical Frameworks and Supplements for details on structure, style and conventions when editing technical framework documents.

Process

Domain Coordination Committee

It would be useful for this page to contain details about how to get Domain documents (that have reached trial implementation or final text) published to the IHE community in a timely fashion.

• Who is responsible for submitting such documents to the secretariat (DONE)
• How should they be submitted (DONE)
• What review/consistency checking, if any, is the secretariat responsible for before publishing
• Who at the secretariat is responsible for publishing them (DONE)
• Where do they get published (DONE)
• What announcements should be sent out to whom