IHE FHIR Profile Publication/Overview and Concepts

IHE FHIR Profile Publication/Overview and Concepts

This page is targeted at an IHE author who wants to write a new supplement that will be published using web based tools and not a PDF document. There are separate forces at work, and you need to understand those.

1. There is general work designed to allow a profile author to write a supplement that will be web based.
2. There is a second level of work intended to support profiles that are based on the HL7 FHIR specification.

There are also other forces such as the use of Github to control files during the publication process. That will be addressed separately.

Supplement Model Background

We need a way to describe supplements with differing levels of complexity. It would be wonderful if we had the perfect solution at the beginning. I suspect it will take a few iterations. I describe a few different models we would have for supplements. We can provide a template for each model.

I decided to not use numeric values for the different models that will be described below. With the exception of the first model (alpha), I am not convinced that one will be able to draw a clear line from one to the next that is monotonically increasing using some measure. I expect you will see more of a connected graph relationship between the various models rather than a series of types where each type has exactly all of the features of the previous type plus one or more new feature. To put it another way, do not take the labels assigned to the models to mean that one supplement model is better than another.

Supplement Types

alpha

alpha: This supplement consists of the following:

• One main HTML page
• One index HTML page
• No other pages
• No other related artifacts other than icons, figures, etc.
• The main HTML page may have web links to other web resources outside of this environment

Note that we make no comment about the level of detail on the main HTML page. It would have to contain enough information to satisfy what is currently in an IHE supplement.

The alpha supplement is intended for a profile author to get started with the documentation process. You will quickly add more files/content once you have an outline.

theta

theta: This supplement consists of the following:

• One main HTML page
• One index HTML page
• At least one other HTML page
• No other related artifacts other than icons, figures, etc.
• The HTML pages may have web links to other web resources outside of this environment

This is slightly more realistic than the alpha supplement. We make no comment on the content of the main and other HTML pages. There will be other models that are more prescriptive. For this version, you could consider a main page with overview, a volume one page and zero or more transaction pages for volume 2 material.

rho

rho: The rho model includes

• The HTML pages described for the theta model (main, index, one or more other pages)
• At least one non-HTML artifact that is included. An example is a zip file with sample files.
• The HTML pages may have web links to other web resources outside of this environment

gamma

The gamma model is a FHIR specific version. This supplement consists of:

• One main HTML page
• One index HTML page
• At least one other HTML page
• One FHIR Implementation Guide XML resource file.
• Zero or more FHIR Capability Statement triplets (xml, json, ttl files)
• Zero or more FHIR Structure Definition triplets (xml, json, ttl files)

No comment is made about the structure/content of the HTML pages

delta

The delta model is a FHIR specific template that has the same baseline requirements as the gamma model. The delta model adds further requirements:

• Need to add specific content that should go in the various HTML files for consistency

Author Requirements

This section describes the content you need to provide to create a supplement.