Category:CPs

Despite the best efforts of the Technical Committees, documents may contain text that is unclear, incomplete or incorrect.

Change Proposals (CPS) are the way stable, published technical documents (Technical Framework volumes, Final Text Supplements or Trial Implementation Supplements) can be modified. Change Proposals may be sumbitted by users, vendors or Technical Committee members, and usually result from experiences implementing Profiles, using Profiles or testing them at Connectathons.

A Submitted Change Proposal has been documented using the latest change proposal template and submitted to a Domain Technical Committee. The Change Proposal should include:

• a problem description,
• a rationale why the change is necessary,
• a proposed solution or approach to the problem,
• and the parts of the Technical Framework or Supplement requested to be changed.

The Technical Committee regularly considers Change Proposals which are then either assigned or rejected.

A Rejected Change Proposal has been rejected by the Technical Committee as inappropriate. It is published with a rationale explaining why.

An Assigned Change Proposal has been accepted by the Technical Committee and assigned to a member of the Technical Committee as a work item for further investigation with the goal to produce adequate clarifications or corrections.

A Cancelled Change Proposal has been cancelled by the Technical Committee and no further work on it is planned. It is published with an explanation of the reason for cancellation (analysis showed it to be inappropriate, it is a duplicate or has been merged with an existing CP, it has been withdrawn, etc.) Question: can you go directly from submitted to canceled? What about a CP that was a duplicate when submitted? Do we really need both canceled and rejected? Lets just call it canceled and in the explanation say if its inappropriate?

An Approved/Done/??? Change Proposal has been reviewed by the Technical Committee and approved as adequate. To allow the text to be considered by a wider group than those attending the given TC meeting, generally an Approved/Done Change Proposal is either:

• distributed for letter ballot to all Domain Technical Committee members, or
• published for a 30-day public comment

Negative votes or issues raised may result in the Change Proposal going back to Assigned or Cancelled.

A Final Text Change Proposal has passed the development and approval process steps. It is published by the Technical Committee, and is then considered effective. It will be merged into the next version of the Technical Framework, typically done at the end of the annual development cycle.

Implementors should base their work on:

the current version of a Technical Framework

+ all Final Text Supplements not yet merged into the Technical Framework

+ all Final Text Change Proposals not yet merged into the Technical Framework or Supplements

<Can we introduce the state of Merged for supplements and CPs? Statements like the above would be simplified to "all Final Text Supplements" if a Final Text Supplement becomes a Merged Supplement after it has been merged into the Technical Framework. We could then tell people to avoid Merged Supplements since they are not maintained.>

Change Proposals

<Imagine a list of change proposals here linking to Word documents on ftp.ihe.net. The lists could be generated automatically using scripts like those used for DICOM. Failing that, the Tech Cmte could manually update the status.> <Would this be one table per domain? I think putting all domains into one table is a management challenge and will not be useful to the user>

<Consider the requirements on the Discussion tab above. It might be useful to group/sort the CPs by Domain and possibly by Profile Affected.>

<Consider links to zipped bundles of CPs instead/in addition. Getting them all one by one is painful>

Change Proposal File names

Change proposals (CP) are kept in a file on the ftp site. The file name will be: <domain>_<number>_<version>.doc where:

• domain is the domain of the CP - one of ITI, RAD, <fill in list>
• number is the nubmer assigned by the domain committee
• version is the version of the draft, starting at 00 and incrementing for each change the the CP.

Example: RAD_123_02.doc, ITI_031_05.doc

When a CP becomes final text the version is changed to FT, as in RAD_123_FT.doc.

All characters are upper case (or lower case, pick one and be consistent).