Using RFD for Public Health Reporting

Today, at the IHE face-to-face meeting, QRPH worked on putting together a concrete model of how public health workflows could use the QRPH public health content profiles with RFD. This was a great discussion that clarified this workflow for a lot of people. For this reason, I thought it would be great to share this with everyone. Let's get the goal defined first - public health organizations would like to receive a standard document with the right and complete data as per the profile specification.

The basic point is that the public health workflow could do this is one of two ways when using RFD:
1. Define the pre-pop data in the RFD Retrieve Form transaction, and require that the Form Filler be able to conform to the pre-pop requirements laid out by the specific public health profile. There are obvious disadvantages to this, and doesn't necessarily even accomplish the public health goal of receiving a standard document that they profiled.
2. Group the Form Receiver with the content creator for the particular public health content profile, and the public health system be the content consumer. This will allow the goal to actually be met. Note that in order to stick with the RFD rules, the actual rules to create the document as per the profile would have to be written into the actual form's "submit" function by the Form Manager OR the Form Manager and Form Receiver would have to be able to collaborate such that the Form Receiver can actually understand the submitted form and create the document as per the profile specification.