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.

Change Proposal Process

The status of a Change Proposal proceeds in the following sequence:

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 and will not be assigned. It is archived with an explanation of the reason for rejection (it is an inappropriate change, it duplicates another CP, it is out of scope, etc.).

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 after being assigned and will not be completed. It is archived with an explanation of the reason for cancellation (investigation/development showed it to be inappropriate, it has been combined with another CP, it has been withdrawn, etc.)

A Completed Change Proposal has been reviewed and the editing judged complete by the Technical Committee. To allow broader feedback, Completed Change Proposals are published:

• for letter ballot by all Domain Technical Committee members, and
• for public comment by non-voting members

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

A Final Text Change Proposal has passed letter ballot and the comments resolved to the satisfaction of the Technical Committee. It is published and considered effective. Implementors are expected to implement Final Text Change Proposals as described below.

A Incorporated Change Proposal has been folded into an updated version of a Technical Framework or Supplement, typically at the end of each annual development cycle. Implementors using the newest published version of a Technical Framework or Supplement are advised to disregard Incorporated Change Proposals since they are already reflected in the new Framework and are not separately maintained.

Implementors should base their work on:

the current version of a Technical Framework

+ all Final Text Supplements

+ all Final Text Change Proposals to the Technical Framework or Supplements

Change Proposal File Names

Change Proposals (CPs) are kept in files named CP-<domain>-<number>-<version>.doc where:

• <domain> is the domain of the CP - one of ITI, RAD, CARD, LAB, EYE, PCC, PCD, RO
• <number> is the number assigned by the domain technical committee
• <version> is the version of the file
  • starting at 00 and incrementing for each revision of the CP (e.g CP-ITI-031-05.doc)
  • FT when a CP becomes final text (e.g. CP-RAD-123-FT.doc)
  • IN when a CP has been incorporated (e.g. CP-CARD-023-IN.doc)

Change Proposal Tracking

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

Each domain technical committee tracks the status of all CPs for the domain in a document named <domain>-CP Tracking-<yyyymmdd>.xls.

Additionally, a list of Final Text CPs for each domain <sorted by profile?> are published in a table linked from the Technical Framework page. The table provides links to the Word document for each CP. <and a zipped bundle of all Final Text CPs in the domain for convenience>

e.g. Radiology Final Text CPs

<The tables/lists could be generated automatically using scripts like those used for DICOM. Failing that, the Tech Cmte could manually update the status. Final Text CPs would be added to the table, Incorporated CPs would be removed from the table.>