Releases of the PS-CA Implementation Guide may be found on a table on the Home Page of this Project.

CA-Baseline

The PS-CA specification attempts to profile in a way that allows the patient summaries (instances) to be conformant to the Canadian Baseline specification without having to formally derive from the profiles in the specification.

In places where profiling of the PS-CA uncovers challenges with the CA Baseline (e.g., CA Baseline requiring an element as Must Support that is not in the PS-CA or IPS-UV) these challenges are noted but should be resolved at the CA Baseline-level according to the established due diligence review criteria.

Alignment with the Canadian Baseline

The FHIR Profiles defined in the PS-CA Implementation Guide, are aligned to the FHIR Canadian Baseline Profiles.

The FHIR Canadian Baseline profiles have been developed to help improve interoperability among healthcare IT solutions across Canada. This standard makes use of the CA Baseline in the following ways:

  • informally aligns to the constraints of the CA Baseline profiles
  • claims a dependency on CA Baseline Implementation Guide to make use of its artefacts (e.g., extensions, value sets, etc),
  • declares conformance to the CA Baseline through the validation of examples against the CA Baseline constraints

To learn more about the Baseline and its benefits, or to contribute to advancing the maturity of the FHIR Canadian Baseline Profiles, please visit Canada Health Infoway’s FHIR Implementers Working Group here.

Use of CA Baseline Profiles

Currently, there are a handful of CA Baseline profiles that are directly used. These include the references to Practitioner, PractitionerRole, and Organization in the Composition profile.

Note: The use of CA Baseline Pratitioner, PractitionerRole, Organization profiles will be superseded by the CA Core profiles (or profiles that impose the CA Core) in future releases but the current usage of CA Baseline profiles will be maintained until a further stabilized CA Core profile (or further Patient Summary requirements) exist.