HL7 Canada Process for Deprecation of FHIR Content - Feedback by Oct 15th 1pm

The HL7 Canada Council has recently heard the proposal from HL7 Ca Baseline to include the following governance protocol for deprecation of FHIR IG & Profile content to be put forward to the HL7 Canada membership to be ratified as a formal HL7 Canada process.

HL7 Canada members are encouraged to provide feedback over the next four weeks (until 1pm ET on October 15th) - feedback will be reviewed on the October 15th HL7 Canada Council call. Any modifications (resulting from feedback discussed on October 15th) will be circulated with the community via this forum.

For those that would like additional context, the process will additionally be raised on the Oct 1st HL7 Canada Community Call.

Proposed HL7 Canada Deprecation Process for FHIR IG & Profile Content- for Membership Ratification:

If content hasn’t been formally published yet (e.g., content in IGuide that has gone to ballot and been reconciled and then published/declared):
- If Draft: The content can be removed entirely without applying a deprecated flag
- The content can be removed entirely without applying a deprecated flag
- May still be reflected as a change in the change log (depending on change log practices – e.g., for two cycles, cumulatively, etc.)

If content has been formally published previously,
- If Draft(FMM0, FMM1, FMM2): Content can be removed without applying a deprecated flag
- If Trial Use (FMM3) Content can be removed without applying a deprecated flag, Content that is removed should be noted in the release log
- If Trial Use (FMM4, FMM5): Content can only be removed after consultation* to community , removal does not require the application of a deprecated flag, Content that is removed should be noted in the release log
- If Normative: Content can only be removed after consultation* to community, Content will have a deprecated status applied to it, notification of the deprecation flag will go on the release log. After it has been deprecated for an explicit period of time (two major releases or two years - whichever comes first) , deprecated content will be removed on a major version (implementers will still be able to refer to earlier packages)

*Consultation = at minimum post on Infocentral FHIR Implementer & HL7 Canada forum asking for feedback then CA Baseline will review feedback and make decision (we will hone this more broadly but this pulls from established process for OID consultation) – even if reader misses consultation window (e.g., 2 weeks- 1 month) there is still opportunity to react in the ballot that has release log item reflecting its removal and can react to that

Rationale: In draft and trial use there is no expectation that content stays the same (e.g., added to, changed, removed), the reason for noting in the release log from trial use is because it is expected to have some form of impact on implementers and this raises it (even without a deprecation status)

Regardless of deprecation, we need to make it clear in the guide that the FMM level should drive how they understand the stability or instability of some of the profiling choices (e.g., warning statement pointing to the FMM page on the main page of the guide)