HL7 New Zealand

Winter 2021 Update

The past few months have been a busy period in the world of HL7 Standards Development. HL7 International recently held its May Working Group Meeting  and 27^th FHIR Connectathon. These events were attended by a combined total of over 1,000 worldwide participants but, due to COVID-19, the location was, once again, the virtual Whova platform.

Two new versions of the FHIR Standard have gone to ballot – R4B  (a sub-version of R4 containing new content and non-breaking changes) and the first draft of R5. While we expect that R4B will be adopted in New Zealand fairly swiftly, the final version of R5 is unlikely to be published until well into 2022 and its implementation will require broad consensus among the local community.

Further updates on HL7 International activity can be found in the May 2021 Edition of HL7 International News and the HL7 International Annual Report. The later focuses on Re-Envisioning HL7 – an initiative designed to ensure that the organisation remains focused, agile, globally-relevant, community-oriented and sustainable.

Locally, the HL7NZ FHIR® Implementation Work Group continues to work on the Base NZ FHIR Implementation Guide. This Group holds fortnightly, one-hour meetings on Fridays at 12:00pm with the aim of balloting and publishing a first version by the end of Q3 this year. All interested parties are welcome to attend these meetings – further details are available here. With the allocation of funding to the National Health Information Platform (nHIP/HIRA) in the recent budget, this work will produce a valuable resource for that project.

This month, we are also planning to resume our series of one-hour lunchtime webinars on topics relating to the implementation of FHIR® with a presentation from Medtech Global on their FHIR Platform ALEX. Further details will be available shortly.