Overview

This section provides an overview of the FHIR resource being profiled. Links are provided to the UK Core and base profiles from which the Data Standards Wales profile is derived. The guidance provided within this section and sections below is in addition to the guidance provided within UK Core and will not be unnecessarily repeated.

Draft and Experimental Profiles

The NHS Wales FHIR Implementation Guide uses three levels of stability and implementation readiness to guide users. They are as follows:

Active

This content has been reviewed and is considered by the authors to be ready for use in production systems. It has been subjected to assurance and approved as an official standard. However, it may not yet have seen widespread use in production across the full spectrum of environments as is intended. In some cases, there may be documented known issues that require implementation experience to determine appropriate resolutions. Future versions of FHIR may make significant changes to Active Trial Use content that are not compatible with previously published content. For more details on Standards for Trial Use, see the HL7 standard development pattern.

Draft

This portion of the specification is not considered to be complete enough or sufficiently reviewed to be safe for implementation. It may have known issues or still be in the "in development" stage. It is included in the publication as a place-holder, to solicit feedback from the implementation community and/or to give implementers some insight as to functionality likely to be included in future versions of the specification. Content at this level should only be used by users who are experienced in both practical implementation and the logical development principles of is very much "use at your own risk". The content that is Draft that will usually be elevated to Trial Use once review and correction is complete after it has been subjected to engagement and assurance.

Experimental

Experimental status is an additional flag appended to Draft status. This portion of the specification is not complete and is not safe for implementation. Whilst it may not include known issues it is still in a state of experimental development. It is included in the publication as a place-holder, to solicit feedback from the implementation community and/or to give implementers some insight as to functionality likely to be included in future versions of the specification. Content at this level should not be implemented, and elevation to Trial Use is neither guaranteed nor necessarily assumed.

Formal Views of Profile Content

The following formal views of the profile content are provided:

• The Snapshot View provides a hierarchical table that presents a logical view of the profile content based on the Logical Table view described in FHIR specification.
• The Differential View shows the difference between the Data Standards Wales profile and the base UK Core profile from which it is derived.
• The Hybrid View provides a combination of the above views.
• FHIR resources that implement the profiles are provided in the Examples view. Every effort has been made to ensure that the examples are correct and useful, but they should not be considered a normative part of the specification.

Mandatory and Must Support Data Elements

Each profile description includes Mandatory and Must Support elements.

Mandatory

In order to be compliant, when an element is mandatory (min=1), the data is expected to always be present - i.e. SHALL be present. Figure 1 below shows how Mandatory elements are presented in the Snapshot View.

Figure 1: Mandatory Elements

Must Support

Elements marked with an S must be supported. While the definition of Must Support is quite general, this implementation guide defines it to mean that provider SHOULD populate these elements where possible, and consumer systems SHOULD act on this information if provided.

If the data does not exist or it is currently technically impossible to populate a Must Support element then you are not required to populate the element. However, it would be expected that in future iterations the system does provide the necessary information.

Depending on the scenario certain Must Support elements may NOT need to be populated. An example would be specialty, if a practitioner does not have one then it does not need to be populated but the element must be supported as other practitioners may have a specialty.

Organization Example

In the case of the Oganization.active element, Must Support would mean, for example:

• A provider system would be expected to provide the relevant indicator to show if the organisation is still active.
• A consuming system would be expected to act on this information and not include an organisation marked as inactive within a list of active organisations.

Figure 2 below shows how Must Support elements are presented in the Snapshot View.

Figure 2: Must Support Elements

Extensions

This section lists FHIR extensions that have been defined to support Welsh-specific data standards or use-cases.

These extensions can be used in addition to those defined within UK Core. Please refer to the extensions section within the UK Core Implementation Guide for further information.

Slices

This section provides information on slices defined within the profile. This section is typically used to define one or more identifiers that can be used within the FHIR resource, e.g. NHS numbers and hospital PAS identifiers.

Terminology Bindings

This section shows any terminology bindings defined for use within the Data Standards Wales profile.

Note that this section does not repeat information on bindings defined for use within the FHIR R4 or UK Core implementation guides.

Concept Maps

This section lists FHIR concept maps that provide a mapping to and from UK Core / HL7 codes to Data Standards Wales codes.