The Shared Pan-Canadian Interoperability Roadmap identifies twelve Building Blocks to address interoperability challenges. Building Block #9 is an Industry-Wide Testing, Compliance and Conformance Infrastructure. Interoperability hinges on vendors’ ability to design systems that are compatible with one another. Typically, this compatibility is assessed through testing, compliance and conformance programs.
In the current state, some jurisdictions and professional organizations have certain compliance services in place. That said, the challenge is in the lack of a pan-Canadian framework where solutions can be easily assessed to ensure they can then move across jurisdictional boundaries. This current state prevents the scaling up of solution portability and potentially creates competing conformance programs at the pan-Canadian level. Contributing factors to the current state include the following:
To address the current state challenges, this Roadmap will focus on the establishment of a first-class conformity assessment program. Conforming a number of core services at the pan-Canadian level will result in the opportunity for predictable growth, while allowing for different deployment architectures across jurisdictions.
Key components of this item include:
Building an Industry-Wide Testing, Compliance and Conformance Infrastructure is a journey. The first step will build on the successes of the first two pan-Canadian Projectathon events held in March 2022 and March 2023 where Infoway, in collaboration with the provinces and territories, invited vendors to participate. Projectathons are an important step and best-practice approach in testing and validation of a specification package, where implementers demonstrate live interoperability of solutions in conformance with pan-Canadian specifications. Read more about Projectathons here.
As we build the Industry-Wide Testing, Compliance and Conformance Infrastructure, the first use case will be the pan-Canadian Patient Summary. Additional use cases, such as eReferral and eConsult will become part of this service offering as the service continues to grow.
As several Canadian jurisdictions prepare for Limited Production Rollouts (LPR), testing will be focused on interoperability demonstrations based on the pan-Canadian Patient Summary (PS-CA v1.1.0 DFT) and the associated pan-Canadian FHIR Exchange (CA:FeX v1.0.0 TI and/or CA:FeX v2.0.0 DFT) specifications. The PS-CA specification defines the building blocks to create and share patient summaries. The CA:FeX specification promotes FHIR RESTful exchange patterns that can be applied on top of existing non-FHIR infrastructure and FHIR servers. These two specification packages support secure exchange of a patient’s health summary document, are represented using the normative release 4.0.1 of the HL7® FHIR® standard, and are closely aligned to the International Patient Summary specification (IPS).
Vendors will have an opportunity to test and demonstrate capabilities in two distinct areas of the specification:
The PS-CA FHIR Content Data model may be tested using a combination of test data and validation tooling.
This area of testing focused on validating the recommended secure exchange methods of the FHIR summary document as presented in the Reference Architecture (RA v0.1.1 DFT), linked to the PS-CA and CA:FeX specifications.
Implementation patterns may differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and information exchange channels may vary in terms of their security footprint. Therefore, the Projectathon test cases have been organized into two categories:
| Category 1: Test cases that test individual actor capabilities in isolation E.g., how a system can handle encrypted transactions, how a system can handle a CA:FeX transaction, how a system can handle an OAuth 2 token exchange, etc. |
| Category 2: Complex test cases that group individual actor capabilities with other relevant actor capabilities to simulate real world scenarios. E.g., how a patient summary creator system can submit the document to a repository by using an OAuth 2 integration, etc. |
Infoway provided training webinars to support the use of the tools and integrations with the Gazelle test framework. Once registered, vendors were provided with early access to the Gazelle platform for self / pre-Projectathon testing. In addition to Gazelle, Infoway provided a number of testing tools, including Simulators, Emulators and Validators to support the exchange patterns listed in the PS-CA specification. A test package was provided including scenarios for single tests and group testing, along with data set to support document format and content validation for the PS-CA and PS-ON.
For more details about each of these topics, please visit the following:
Testing results will be collected into a report, on the individual and group actor transactions that vendor systems have proven capabilities in supporting.
