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Conformance

Conformance Reboot 2027

Renewing the Conformance Work Group through practical learning, project engagement, and a sustainable approach to organizing and preserving its work.

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Stage and Path

Stage

Active

Receiving discussion, preparation, review, or technical work. Includes standing work-group business.

Path

Discussion and Review

Work-group discussion, decisions, coordination, or routine review.

Overview

This topic coordinates the renewal of the Conformance Work Group around practical learning, project engagement, and focused technical contributions. The group is establishing a sustainable way to discover relevant work, organize discussions, preserve findings, and connect people with conformance expertise. Activities include setting up InteropHub, refining the group’s operating approach, and preparing a future PSS engagement pilot.

Coming soon

Support for source material, diagrams, and supporting notes is coming in a future update.

Meetings

MeetingAgendaPresenter(s)
Conformance Work Group
Oct 6, 2026
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

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Topic ID: 146
capability planning Public Read-only view