This page is part of the FHIR Specification (v0.11: DSTU 1 Ballot 3). The current version which supercedes this version is 5.0.0. For a full list of available versions, see the Directory of published versions

Ballot Welcome 1.13

Hello and welcome to the first FHIR DSTU ballot!

While this is the first ballot with an official status, this specification is the product of many thousands of hours of development, including two draft ballots, two QA cycles, 3 Connectathons and production of a number of reference and proof of concept implementations. Therefore we hope that you find the specification already close to an implementable state.

The FHIR specification is presented as a series of interlinked HTML pages. You can review whichever links are of interest in any order you wish. However, to ensure a base level understanding of the specification we recommend that you click on the Documentation link and read through at least the following:

(for context)

• Overview/1 page Summary (Glossy)
• Overview/Introduction
• Overview/Coming Challenges Driving Change

(to see scope)

• Click on the Resources link at the top to get a sense of what resources exist and maybe drill into a couple of them to see what they look like before coming back to the Documentation tab for more context

(to understand base approach)

• Resources/Resource Definitions
• Resources/Narratives
• Resources/Formats: XML, JSON
• Resources/Extensibility
• Resources/Formal Definitions

(to understand key infrastructure)

• Data Types/Definitions
• Using Terminologies/Introduction and Overview

(for context for this ballot)

• Administration/Outstanding Issues

Feel free to drill down into any other sections of interest. If you want to ensure a complete review of the whole spec, the Documentation/Administration/Table of Contents may be a useful guide.

A few notes to consider:

• Not all of the outstanding issues will be resolved prior to the DSTU ballot passing. Some may be left open to allow feedback from the early adopter community.
• See the note about the DSTU status on the License/Legal page
• This specification is complete enough to be implementable in a variety of healthcare scenarios, including supporting all content from the Consolidated CDA implementation guide. However, the set of resources is not complete. Resources may evolve and new ones will be introduced during the DSTU phase.

When submitting your ballot feedback, if you have a general comment on something that you see occurring multiple times, please include at least a couple of specific locations where you see the issue. As much as possible, capture each separate concern as a distinct row in the ballot sheet. It makes our job of reconciling much easier. Also, don’t forget to fill in the section numbers (little grey numbers to the right of each heading) and, where appropriate, additional location information.

If you have questions that are interfering with the ability to review the specification or submit ballot comments, please contact one of the co-chairs of the FHIR Management Group: Lloyd McKenzie or Hugh Glover.

Thanks for taking the time to review the FHIR specification. We appreciate any feedback you can provide.

The HL7 FHIR Management Group (FMG)