Background: The General Guidance section is intended to document both requirements, clarifications and informative guidelines that apply in general and across the guide as it states in its introduction: This section outlines important definitions, interpretations, and requirements common to all US Core actors used in this guide. The conformance verbs   SHALL ,  SHOULD ,  MAY   used in this guide are defined in  FHIR Conformance Rules .     FHIR Conformance language: 2.1.0.1 Conformance Language  This specification uses the conformance verbs SHALL, SHOULD, and MAY as defined in RFC 2119. Unlike RFC 2119, however, this specification allows that different applications might not be able to interoperate because of how they use optional features. In particular: SHALL: an absolute requirement for all implementations SHALL NOT: an absolute prohibition against inclusion for all implementations SHOULD/SHOULD NOT: A best practice or recommendation to be considered by implementers within the context of their particular implementation; there may be valid reasons to ignore an item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course MAY: This is truly optional language for an implementation; can be included or omitted as the implementer decides with no implications Reasoning: We acknowledge that there is a mixture of required and informative content and agree it may be clearer for the reader to clearly distinguish between them. Proposed Changes: The content will be split into three page "USCDI "General Requirements Page" mandatory content optional content - clarify what the conformance language means when for optional topic is supported. "General Guidance: for informative content