Release 4B

1.10.0 HL7, ANSI and the FHIR Standard

FHIR Management Group Maturity Level: N/AStandards Status: Informative
HL7 is an ANSI Accredited Standards Development Organization. As such, ANSI reviews HL7 processes both in general, and also specifically with regard to each standard. While ANSI certified that portions of this release of FHIR (Release 4) met its requirements for development of a formal standard, this version (R4B) is a trial use version, and ANSI will not be asked to certify R4B. HL7 has still treated these portions of the specifications as Normative, and no breaking changes have been made to the specifications.

Given that many areas of the FHIR specification are still undergoing Trial Use by the HL7 Community, and hence are not ready for balloting as a formal ANSI standard, and in order to manage the processes around the ballot process, four specific portions of this specification are considered as Normative Specifications:

Infrastructure The core framework on which FHIR solutions depend (Abstract base types, data types, formats, the RESTful API, and content and typing rules)
Conformance The terminology infrastructure and the base resources that define FHIR implementations and that represent how the specification, and conformance to it, is defined
Patient The Patient resource and related content
Observation The Observation resource and related content

Given that the Normative parts of the standard are still a subset of what implementers need to use, implementers are generally focusing on conforming to FHIR R4 as a whole rather than the formal standards. Future versions of this specification will extend the coverage of format standards.