Professionalization

This specification defines what "professional" means for this repository and binds the maintainer as much as any contributor. The audience is healthcare professionals and the engineers who serve them, worldwide, in production use; the standing constraint is that a wrong claim in this domain has clinical cost. Rationale and current execution state live in plan.md and tasks.md; this file holds the rules.

Rules#

Plans are files, and a checked box is a verified fact. plan.md and tasks.md exist at the repository root. A [x] means the work was done and verified, with the evidence named — never that it is intended, assumed, or inherited from a sibling repository.
The special files exist and stay accurate. The canonical list is spec/special-files-for-public-repos/. Every countable claim in those files (crate counts, test counts, coverage lists, "X is enabled/disabled") is measured before it is written and re-verified when cited.
Self-declared gaps are promises. A gap named in SECURITY.md, MAINTAINERS.md, or AI_STATEMENT.md ("no CI", "unsigned commits") is either closed or consciously accepted in tasks.md — and the declaring document is updated in the same change that closes it.
CI enforces what documents claim. Every check a document says this repository runs (tests, clippy, fmt, MSRV, trademark rules, doc gates) runs in CI on every push. A laptop-only check is a claim, not a guarantee.
Trademark discipline. The marks are HL7® and FHIR® (and CDA®, which this repository's prose does not use), owned by Health Level Seven International. The normative terms are spec/hl7-trademarks-fair-use/: the registration mark follows the first prose use of a word mark on each page; any page using a mark carries the disclaimer verbatim; places of prominence say "HL7® FHIR® standard". Enforcement is scripts/check-trademarks.sh — root *.md plus help/**, code and link targets masked — run by the trademarks job in .github/workflows/gates.yml. Documents outside the script's scope, this one included, comply anyway.
Patient data is addressed in plain language. PHI.md at the root states what the software does and does not do with patient data, for a reader who is a privacy officer, not a Rust programmer. It never claims compliance or certification.
Conduct has a document and a path. CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the root (Contributor Covenant 2.1 plus this family's claim-accuracy clause: overstating what the software does is a conduct matter, not only a bug).
Harmonization runs through the family. The sibling repositories (hl7-rust, er7-rust, snomed-rust, openehr-rust) share these rules, the special-files list, and the six workstreams (governance; compliance — licensing and trademarks; security and supply chain; privacy and patient data; outreach; audit and harmonization). Conventions sync from the repository that owns the canonical copy — for the special-files list and the trademark spec, that is this one — rather than drifting independently.
Outreach is gated. No promotion while a rule above is unmet for the surface being promoted; help/outreach/index.md names the prerequisites.

Status in this repository#

Assessed 2026-08-26, mid-landing; re-verified 2026-08-29 against the tree as it now stands, not assumed from the original assessment. Most of what that first pass called "partly" or "open item" closed in the three days between — recorded here rather than left to read as still true.

Rule 1 — met. plan.md and tasks.md exist at the root, committed, with checkbox discipline stated in both files' preambles and exercised continuously since (F-67's decision, the funding and trusted-publishing work, and this re-verification itself all landed as dated tasks.md entries).
Rule 2 — met. All canonical files exist and are committed. The three countable inaccuracies the original assessment named are each closed, checked directly rather than trusted: LICENSE.md's manifest count now reads 34 everywhere in the file (line 32 still said 33 until this re-verification caught it — measured fresh: 41 total [package] manifests, 7 publish = false, 34 publishable); AI_STATEMENT.md has one source, the root, with the spec/special-files-for-public-repos/ copy a pointer rather than a divergent draft; and that same file's own status section is current, not stale, as of 2026-08-26.
Rule 3 — met. The gaps this rule is about are no longer gaps: annotated tags exist for every published version (git tag -l | wc -l to count them at any time; spec/git-tags-name-published-versions/), commit and tag signing has been active since 2026-08-27 (verified: git log -1 --format=%G? returns G), laptop publishing is a stated permanent decision rather than an open gap, and F-67 was decided 2026-08-28 — accept the risk formally, documented in M14.34 and everywhere the risk is named to a reader — then closed outright 2026-08-29 by switching the driver from tiberius to mssql. Nothing here is an open item any more; the record of how each closed is what tasks.md and the audit register hold.
Rule 4 — met. Eleven workflows cover all four families (fhir-ci.yml, one <port>-ci.yml per port, fhir-store-ci.yml, fhir-loco-ci.yml, fhir-security.yml, gates.yml). The trademarks gate runs in gates.yml. cargo deny on push is not paths-filtered to fhir/** — checked directly against .github/workflows/fhir-security.yml rather than trusted from the prior assessment: both its push and pull_request triggers list all nine workspace paths, and its job matrix runs cargo deny against each workspace's own deny.toml independently.
Rule 5 — met tree-wide. scripts/check-trademarks.sh passes on root *.md + help/** and on the nine top-level crate roots' rustdoc (run 2026-08-26). Coverage has been tree-wide since 2026-08-26 — every markdown file in the repository, including each port's book/ chapters — as recorded in spec/hl7-trademarks-fair-use/index.md and tasks.md §Compliance.
Rule 6 — met. PHI.md committed 2026-08-26, corrected against the conformance matrix before landing.
Rule 7 — met. CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md committed 2026-08-26, claims verified against AI_STATEMENT.md §8, AGENTS.md rule 5, MAINTAINERS.md.
Rule 8 — open. This repository's copies are the canon for the special-files list and the trademark spec; the siblings have drifted and re-sync from here (tasks.md §Audit and harmonization).
Rule 9 — met, and narrower than when this rule was written. help/outreach/index.md gated promotion on PM-70–PM-75; checked directly against that file rather than repeated from memory, five of those six (PM-70, 71, 73, 74, 75) are done, and the sixth (PM-72, benchmarks — one port of six has a real harness, and the JSONB-vs-relational comparison the whole pitch rests on has never been run) is now the only thing gating outreach phase 1, alongside PM-76 (a machine-readable conformance statement), which was never in the original six.

Trademarks#

HL7®, and FHIR® are the registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International and their use of these trademarks does not constitute an endorsement by HL7.