Governance of Inera's FHIR Standards

This page describes the general governance for Inera's FHIR standards — how they are developed, maintained, versioned and retired.

Governance principles

Inera's FHIR standards are governed according to the following principles:

• Transparency — all standards and their change history are publicly available on GitHub and Simplifier.net.
• Collaboration — requirements are gathered in collaboration with regions, municipalities, system vendors and clinical stakeholders.
• Stability — breaking changes are minimised and communicated well in advance.
• Interoperability — Inera's profiles build on national base profiles from HL7 Sweden and international standards from HL7 International.

Lifecycle of a FHIR standard

Requirement → Design → Review → Publish (pre-release) → Pilot → Publish (release) → Maintenance → Retirement

Phase	Description
Requirement	Business requirements are gathered from stakeholders and analysed.
Design	FHIR profiles, extensions and terminology are designed in collaboration with clinical and technical experts.
Review	Draft IG is reviewed by stakeholders and system vendors. Feedback is incorporated.
Pre-release	The IG is published as a pre-release (e.g. 1.0.0-beta.1) for pilot implementations. Not for production use.
Pilot	Selected organisations implement and test the standard in a controlled environment.
Release	The IG is published as a stable release and approved for production use.
Maintenance	Ongoing bug fixes (patch versions) and minor improvements (minor versions).
Retirement	The standard is deprecated and eventually retired, with a migration path to a successor standard.

Versioning

Inera's FHIR standards use semantic versioning (SemVer 2.0):

• MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH — e.g. 2.1.4
• Pre-releases use a suffix — e.g. 2.0.0-beta.1

Version part	When it changes
MAJOR	Incompatible changes — existing implementations need to be updated.
MINOR	New features added in a backward-compatible way.
PATCH	Backward-compatible bug fixes.

Major and minor version decisions are made in consultation with the relevant governance groups and documented in release notes.

Roles and responsibilities

Role	Responsibility
Inera FHIR team	Designs and maintains FHIR profiles and IGs.
Service manager	Owns the business requirements for a specific service.
Stakeholder group	Regions, municipalities and clinical experts who participate in requirements gathering and review.
System vendors	Implement the standards and provide feedback from a technical implementation perspective.

Change request process

1. A change request is submitted as a GitHub issue or by email to fhir@inera.se.
2. Inera assesses the impact and urgency of the request.
3. The request is prioritised and scheduled for a future version.
4. The change is implemented, reviewed and published as part of a new version.
5. The requester is notified and the change is documented in the release notes.

Questions?

Contact the Inera FHIR team at fhir@inera.se.