The purpose of the CDA Web Publishing project is to move the creation and maintenance of CDA Implementation Guides onto the new common HL7 publishing tools to improve the usefulness and continuous improvement of the CDA IG specifications. The scope of the project covers all the core functionalities supported by the previous Trifolia Workbench IG publishing tools and supports creating CDA IGs that are compliant with the CDA IG Quality Criteria. The new common HL7 publishing tools also will support instance validation against defined templates in the same ways that it supports validation of FHIR profiles, to the extent possible, but at a minimum match the capabilities supported under the current tooling stack. The scope may cover the additional work associated with implementing a validation website for FHIR that would allow you to specify what IG to validate against, and upload a file to validate, much like Lantana's or NIST's web-based validator(s).

The scope of the project does not cover publication of the base CDA Core Specification. CDA is dependent on the RIM data types and RIM value sets and code systems and the RIM RMIM modeling methodology. The FHIR tooling can ingest the CDA base model, which then can be constrained, but it cannot facilitate the construction of a RIM compliant CDA model. Requirements to support sustainability of the base CDA Core Specification do need to be addressed, but that need will be covered under a different project.

Use of the new publishing tooling will reduce the burden of specification evolution for HL7 members responsible for updating and improving the specifications, increase scalability of the specification to support an expanding range of data for exchange, reduce cost of publication and maintenance of specifications for HL7 through a unified process, increase the quality of HL7 standards by improving the interoperability of information exchange specifications across HL7 product families, and open a path toward better publishing tools that make specification creation easier and more consistent across HL7 product families.

The intent is to ballot this representation of CDA as an Informative document with the scope being restricted to ensuring that the representation is accurate and faithful to the actual CDA specification.  This is intended to be done in an Out-Of-Cycle ballot between September 2023 and January 2024.