Did something change in the IG I am using?

 IHE and HL7 are writing and revising Implementation Guides at a fervent rate. There are other organizations also writing and revising Implementation Guide, some are regional IHE or HL7 organizations, and many more.  Everyone that writes an Implementation Guide (IG) desires to create a perfect and fully comprehensive specification on the first try. However, that is simply not realistic, and any IG that has had only one version is most likely one that no one is using.

Two very important standards organization mechanisms are critical to the achieving a perfect IG. 

1. Clear indications of the changes that were made and why.
2. Method for the users of the IG to submit comments and improvement requests.

How do you know what has changed?

Within IHE we try hard to produce a human friendly listing of the changes that have happened at each version. These would not include inconsequential changes such as typos. This likely just summarizes some change (e.g. "added examples").  You will find these on the main page (index.html) of the IG, in a pink Note section

You can also get to all the historic versions through the "Directory of published versions" link found on the top of the main page (index.html) in the bright yellow box. On the history page you can find each historic version, and the above mentioned changes should also show up here.

The next level of details is to look at all the closed github issues (or in the case of HL7 the closed jira tickets). Select the "Issues" link in the footer, and navigate to closed issues. Sorry, not going to try to explain github issue tracking here. If you know how to use it, then you know.

If you are really interested in technical conformance resource changes, this also available, although not as easy to find. This you must first go to the footer of the IG, and select "QA Report"

On the QA Report, there is a section "Previous Version Comparison" that will give you very detailed computer generated differences.

How do I submit a comment?

Standards live by comments; they really are the food that makes standards useful. So please submit a comment anytime you have one. Best time to comments is during Public-Comment, as we are planning on addressing comments at that time with the intent to resolve all of the public-comments received. 

Comments can be identifying a typo or bug, something that is not clear to you, something you and a peer argue about, or something you would like the IG to do. All comments are welcome.

You can comment at any time, even after Public-Comment when the IG is Trial-Implementation, or even when it goes Final-Text (normative). Within the Implementation Guide you want to comment on there are two ways. The first way is to submit a github issue, this is the first red circle. The second yellow circle is "Propose a change" which is a web form that anyone (member or not) can use.

Conclusion

As a specification gets more normative, it will change less. In theory normative status (Final-Text) the specification will not get a change that breaks any system that used the previous. But the status of a specification should never stop you from submitting a comment at anytime.