Implementation Guidance > Conformance Rules

Conformance Rules

FHIR is a general purpose specification and imposes no particular requirements on implementers to support specific resources, operations, search parameters or other capabilities. To achieve interoperability in a particular domain, it's important that implementors make similar decisions about what FHIR capabilities those systems will support. FHIR uses the Conformance resource to define the actual or expected capabilities of a particular system.

Must Support Flag

To maximize interoperability, this implementation guide uses the MustSupport flag to identify elements that implementers must understand in order to properly submit data. Please refer to the guidance below:

Submitting Data

When submitting data to the MHA PDS Repository, a system must demonstrate that it is capable of providing the elements marked with the "MustSupport" flag in accordance with the profile definition and associated business rules. A data submission may not always contain these elements.

Elements without the "MustSupport" flag in a FHIR data submission may be ignored. Unless there is written implementation guidance to indicate that an element is considered optional and may be sent if available, the element should not be present in the message. No error will be generated because these elements are present or missing.

Data Formatting

Letter Case

Information in the MHA PDS Repository is stored as mixed case and information is preserved in the format provided by the source (e.g. ALL UPPER CASE, Mixed Case, lower case).

Extended Character Set

Information within MHA PDS Repository shall be in UTF-8 to support extended characters beyond standard ASCII/ANSI character set including French characters.

Date

In this specification, the expected date format is "YYYY-MM-DD". If this format is not provided, or an invalid date is provided in the defined format, the request will be rejected.Below are the formats supported:

DateTime(accept two formats):

  • 2015-01-07T13:28:17-05:00 or
  • 2015-01-07T18:28:17Z

URI/UUID

Uniform Resource Identifier (URIs) leveraged in the MHA PDS Respository are case insensitive. URIs can be absolute or relative, and may have an optional fragment identifier (e.g. “urn:uuid:53fefa32-fcbb-4ff8-8a92-55ee120877b7”).