Clinical Practice Guidelines, published by HL7 International / Clinical Decision Support. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 2.0.0-draft built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/HL7/cqf-recommendations/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions
To facilitate publishing and distribution of knowledge artifacts, this Implementation Guide defines several profiles that enable the use of FHIR Bundle to package knowledge artifacts, either independently, or as part of a collection of related artifacts.
Knowledge artifacts as represented within FHIR follow a general, high-level content development work flow:
In addition, the experimental element may be used to indicate that the artifact is intended for testing/experimental usage only and should not be used in production settings.
In general, artifacts such as libraries, measures, and test cases are packaged as a Bundle
of type collection
, indicating that the Bundle is a collection of resources for distribution and
carries no additional processing semantics (as opposed to a transaction
, or document
bundle).
An artifact bundle contains the artifact as the first entry in the bundle, and optionally the dependencies and associated artifacts as subsequent entries as follows:
Artifact content conforming to this implementation guide SHALL use the CPGArtifactBundle profile to package artifacts for distribution.
Depending on the capabilities of intended target environments, artifacts may be packaged with different profiles to support different expectations. For example, a ValueSet may be packaged as only an ExecutableValueSet when it is intended for use in an environment that does not have the ability to expand a ComputableValueSet, and needs to be careful about overall resource size. In addition, some environments may have specific formatting expectations, such as the use of JSON for serialization of both FHIR resources and CQL ELM. The profiles in this implementation guide support the construction of these types of packages, but are not prescriptive about that, leaving flexibility for content implementation guides to make decisions relevant to their expected target environments.
Artifact content conforming to this implementation guide SHOULD provide artifact packages appropriate for their expected target environment, and SHALL provide guidance about what those expectations are.
In addition to artifact bundles for distribution purposes, this implementation guide supports the definition of an artifact collection using the Library resource to define a collection of related artifacts. The CPGAssetCollection profile supports this capability.
Basic testing of artifact logic should involve at least one positive and negative test of each artifact. A test case is represented as a set of test resources, together with a expected outcome resource that defines the expected results. The test case bundle can then be used to package and distribute the test case.
For general purpose evaluation and decision support content, the expected outcome is represented using a GuidanceResponse resource, while the use case of measure evaluation is represented using a MeasureReport resource. Test cases in general are represented using a bundle with the following general structure:
Content conforming to this implementation guide SHALL use the CPGTestCaseBundle bundle to define and distribute test cases.