Announcement: #FHIR publishing plans

Jan 16, 2016

At the Orlando meeting, the FHIR Management Group (FMG) made an important decision around the future plans for the FHIR specification. In March 2015, the FMG decided to publish DSTU2 that covered the base infrastructure, and to plan to release a DSTU 2.1 that left the infrastructure unchanged, and filled out additional details around the Financial and workflow resources, for ballot in the May ballot.

We’ve been following that plan until the meeting in Orlando, but it was evident that we needed to reconsider our plans. There were two reasons why:

  • Resolving the issues around the workflow resources was taking longer than we hoped, and sticking to our plan would mean no connectathon testing of the redesign
  • There was ongoing pressure to make changes to resources that were frozen for DSTU 2.1

After consulting with as many stakeholders as we could, and considering the ramifications of waiting until the September ballot, FMG decided that we will no longer publish a DSTU 2.1 version. We will instead plan to ballot DSTU 3 in September, with a likely publication date late this year.

At this stage, we don’t know all of what is planned for DSTU3. It certainly will include:

  • Significant changes to the financial resources
  • A total redesign of the workflow related resources
  • A set of new resources to support clinical reasoning and decision support

There will be other changes; I’ll discuss these later as the process continues.

Note: this is really an official FHIR Product Director Announcement; I’ll move it to the HL7 Product Director blog once that’s set up.