Conformance Work Group

Meeting

Date

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Time

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM America/New_York

Status Completed

Meeting Information

All Conformance Work Group Meetings

The Conformance Work Group meets every other Tuesday to discuss implementation guides, adapting HL7 standards to real-world needs, and methods for specifying, interpreting, and testing conformance. Meetings include project updates, technical discussions, and work-group business.

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Meeting ID: 983 1134 7134

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Agenda time matches scheduled meeting length.

Topic / Time	Agenda	Presenter(s)
Welcome and Introductions Current topic 1:00 PM–1:05 PM 5 min	Welcome Introductions Notes Everyone is logging onto the new application.
Work Group Administration Current topic 0 following · 0 here today 1:05 PM–1:25 PM 20 min	Work Group Health PSS to Review https://jira.hl7.org/browse/PSS-2803 https://jira.hl7.org/browse/PSS-2770 https://jira.hl7.org/browse/PSS-2778 https://jira.hl7.org/browse/PSS-2810 Notes WGM notes have been completed Have not reviewed work group health, will report back on this in the next meeting Reviewing PSS PSS-2803 Reviewed PSS-2770 Reviewed - Conformance needs to be involved Nathan will create a new topic for this, and I will see how we can engage in this process PSS-2778 Reviewed PSS-2810 Reviewed Outcomes Have not reviewed work group health, will report back on this in the next meeting Nathan will create a new topic for this, and I will see how we can engage in this process	Nathan Bunker
Conformance Reboot 2027 Current topic 0 following · 0 here today 1:25 PM–1:55 PM 30 min	Review of plans Review of packet for Prometheus Notes Talking about current process. Links to look at: https://build.fhir.org/ig https://fhir.org/guides/registry/ IG registry repository: https://github.com/FHIR/ig-registry List of IGS: https://github.com/FHIR/ig-registry/blob/master/fhir-ig-list.json List of use: https://packages2.fhir.org/xig/resource/hl7.fhir.uv.extensions%7Ccurrent/StructureDefinition/StructureDefinition-obligation.json Example of use: https://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/en/StructureDefinition-AllergyIntolerance-uv-ips.html The term IG is overloaded in FHIR. It's really akin to the concept of "project". Team should look at anything published in the last two years What is the goal? Want to get guides that are more recent Looking for how is conformance being specified and to what depth If using Must Support what mechanisms do they use? How are they using obligations? How are they defining this? How consistent are they in defining these? Are they using the FHIR resource requirements to state these? Are they using data absent reason? Must have a value? Frank and Rob need to provide a search criteria. How many have extensional bindings on vocabularies. Need to prove what we probably already know that FHIR conformance all over the place and there is no consistency. Maybe the first assignment, what guides support "Must Support" and also those who support "Obligations". Explaining the meeting of Must Support and Obligations and their history and interaction with Conformance concepts. Must Support has a lot of inconsistency Conformance pushed for this to be cleaned up, Grahame created obligations based on a review of how how must support was implemented and to replace common names. The definitions for obligations were not better than what was defined by IG authors who didn't know conformance concepts. There was not hierarchy or methodology. Obligations or capabilities are different concepts. We are past the point of changing the obligations or effecting changes Not without good reason Need to have a system that demonstrates better testing There is an important difference between functional and structural guides. The obligations start to blur those lines. Patient demographics has the same example. Some systems might just match, or in others they are stored. You have to start digging into the granularity of the use case. Should this even be in there, or you push down the layers of specification. Store, and translation can be defined at a very detailed level. Long term goal is to have a more coordinated and direct method for declaring conformance. Everything derives from a higher level specification. That work needs to be done from the top to bottom down. Frank talked about IGs published on GitHub. Whenever you commit resources to the IG the website is automatically regenerated. Done by every commit. If you are not working on IG and committing then the last update-date is older, and then in a few months it is deleted on build.fhir.org.	Nathan Bunker
Wrap Up Current topic 1:55 PM–2:00 PM 5 min	Next steps Next topics Notes Next meeting is in three weeks. Youssef likely not able to make that meeting.	Nathan Bunker