SMART Base — folio-assistant

Overview

WHO SMART Guidelines (Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive, Requirements-based, and Testable) are a set of WHO clinical guidelines that have been transformed into a computable, interoperable format. They enable countries to rapidly adopt, adapt, and implement WHO recommendations within their digital health systems by providing structured, machine-readable clinical content.

A Digital Adaptation Kit (DAK) is the primary artefact of WHO SMART Guidelines. It is a structured, standardised package of clinical and operational content that represents a WHO health intervention in a computable form. Each DAK contains:

Health interventions and recommendations – the clinical guidance from WHO
Generic personas – representative end-users and actors in the health system
User scenarios – narrative descriptions of how the guidance is used in practice
Business processes and workflows – step-by-step care pathways
Core data elements – the data dictionary for the health domain
Decision-support logic – computable clinical decision rules
Functional and non-functional requirements – system capability requirements
Program indicators – aggregate measures and metrics for monitoring and evaluation
Test scenarios – structured tests to validate conformance

The diagram below illustrates the nine components of a WHO DAK and how they relate to one another:

WHO Digital Adaptation Kit – nine-component overview diagram — Figure 1 – The nine components of a WHO Digital Adaptation Kit (DAK)

This implementation guide contains base conformance resources for use in all WHO SMART Guidelines implementation guides.

Authoring Lifecycle

The DAK authoring lifecycle is a five-phase process spanning planning, L2 DAK authoring, L3 FHIR authoring, quality control, and publication. The BPMN 2.0 collaboration diagram below shows the end-to-end process with swimlanes for each authoring persona.

See the SMART IG Starter Kit for more information on building and using WHO SMART Guidelines.

DAK (Digital Adaptation Kit) URL Handling

For repositories that contain a dak.json file in the root directory, this implementation guide provides enhanced URL handling for publication and preview scenarios:

Publication URLs

WHO Repositories: For repositories owned by WorldHealthOrganization, the publication URL follows the pattern https://smart.who.int/{stub} where {stub} is the repository name with any smart- prefix removed.
Other Repositories: Use the canonical URL specified in sushi-config.yaml or fall back to GitHub Pages pattern.

Preview URLs

All Repositories: Preview URLs use the GitHub Pages pattern https://{profile}.github.io/{repo} for current CI builds.

Branch-Based URL Selection

Release Branches (prefixed with release-): Use publication URLs for canonical references and resource identifiers.
Development Branches: Use preview URLs for canonical references and resource identifiers.

The DAK configuration is automatically regenerated during CI builds to ensure URLs are appropriate for the current branch context.

Dependencies

IG	Package	Comment
hl7.terminology	hl7.terminology#7.3.0	not in the package cache this build read, so what it depends on is not shown
hl7.fhir.uv.extensions.r4	hl7.fhir.uv.extensions.r4#5.3.0	not in the package cache this build read, so what it depends on is not shown
hl7.fhir.uv.cql	hl7.fhir.uv.cql#2.0.0	not in the package cache this build read, so what it depends on is not shown
hl7.fhir.uv.cpg	hl7.fhir.uv.cpg#2.0.0	not in the package cache this build read, so what it depends on is not shown
hl7.fhir.uv.crmi	hl7.fhir.uv.crmi#2.0.0	not in the package cache this build read, so what it depends on is not shown
hl7.fhir.uv.sdc	hl7.fhir.uv.sdc#4.0.0	not in the package cache this build read, so what it depends on is not shown

Package

FHIR

Comment

hl7.terminology

hl7.terminology#7.3.0