FHIR R5 Symptoms Implementation Guide, published by HL7 International / Clinical Interoperability Council. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.1.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/HL7/fhir-symptoms-ig/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

Conformance Expectations

Systems

This guide defines the responsibilities of a Symptom system

Symptom systems are typically Electronic Medical Record (EHR) systems but could theoretically be any system responsible for recording patient symptoms.

MustSupport

This implementation guide uses specific terminology to flag statements that have relevance for the evaluation of conformance with the guide:

• SHALL indicates requirements that must be met to be conformant with the specification.

• SHOULD indicates behaviors that ought to be adhered to to avoid suboptimal interoperability but which do not, for this version of the specification, affect the determination of specification conformance.

• MAY describes optional behaviors that are free to consider but where there is no recommendation for or against adoption.

As well, profiles in this implementation guide make use of the mustSupport element. Base expectations for the intepretations of these terms are set in the FHIR core specification.

Along with those expectations, the following rules on MustSupport are also required:

• Systems SHALL be capable of returning resource instances containing any of the data elements that are marked as Must Support.
• Systems SHALL be capable of receiving all data elements that are marked as Must Support. They SHALL NOT generate an error or cause the application to fail when receiving any data element that is marked as Must Support.
• Systems SHOULD NOT send any data elements that are not marked as Must Support. If these data elements are included, the receiving System MAY ignore those elements.