Project

The original version of this implementation guide was prepared as a U.S. Realm Specification on behalf of the Structured Data Capture project - an effort under the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator (ONC)'s Standards and Infrastructure (S & I) Framework.

The new version of this guide was developed by the FHIR Infrastructure work group in collaboration with and thanks to funding from the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). As part of the revision of the implementation guide, the very limited portions of the implementation guide that were U.S. specific have been relaxed, making the guide applicable to all countries. Representatives from several non-U.S. jurisdictions were part of the project calls where the revisions to the implementation guide were determined.

Readers of this IG should be aware that there is a distinct (and non-FHIR-based) implementation guide developed and maintained by IHE that also goes by the name of "SDC - Structured Data Capture". More information about the IHE initiative can be found here. While there are similar workflows envisioned and the two projects originated as part of the same initiative, the two approaches are not compatible or easily mappable - in part because of FHIR's decision to split Questionnaire and QuestionnaireResponse into distinct resources, while the IHE specification uses a single structure for both. Implementers instructed to "comply with SDC" should confirm which 'SDC' specification they're expected to comply with...

Ongoing maintenance of the SDC IG, as well as providing support on the use of the FHIR Questionnaire resources in general is managed through the FHIR Infrastructure work group's SDC project. This group holds weekly calls and conducts regular connectathons and also monitors the Questionnaire stream on http://chat.fhir.org. It also reviews feedback provided about the specification submitted by those using the 'propose a change' link at the bottom of this and all other IG pages. Project details, minutes and call information can be found on the project Confluence page. Additional participants are welcome to join as we further refine the implementation guide and work to increase adoption through connectathons, open-source projects and other mechanisms.

Credits

This implementation guide represents thousands of person-hours of discussion, development work, and testing. The following are some of the key participants in the work, but many more have assisted through connectathons testing, asking questions and participating in conference calls.

This list inevitably fails to mention many of the individuals who contributed their time and energy to developing this specification and making it better. Thanks to all of you!