Festive Seasons Greetings from HL7NZ Chairman – Peter Jordan
As many end of year summaries will note, 2016 has been a transformational year, both in the Health and Disability Sector as well as the world at large. Within HL7 New Zealand itself, we have followed what appears to have been a broader trend in making a leadership change after an eight year tenure.
Hence it’s my first task, as the incoming Chairman, to thank David Hay for his magnificent leadership of our Affiliate in that period. In particular, David has been at the forefront in the development of the new HL7® FHIR® standard giving New Zealand a seat at the top table of an international project with, to date, over one thousand active participants! However, we’ve not allowed David to retire to his beach hut or the after-dinner speaking circuit: instead he has been awarded the honorary title of Chair Emeritus and will remain on our Board as the strategic lead for FHIR.
Another worldwide trend that’s been mirrored locally has been a shift of emphasis from eHealth and Healthcare IT to Digital Health, with major organisational and personnel changes within the Ministry of Health underpinning the new Digital Health Work Programme 2020. A key component of this strategy will be the adoption of international standards, notably for building APIs to facilitate the interoperability between systems that will provide the right information at the right time to the right people – be they the deliverers or consumers of healthcare services.
FHIR offers a unique platform for building such APIs and has already been implemented, in varying degrees, by nearly all of the 50 odd countries with HL7 membership. Healthcare is increasingly seen as a round-the-clock, global service and only standards that work across jurisdictions will meet this requirement. Another international standard SNOMED CT was a major focus in the NZ sector this year with the highly-successful Expo hosted in Wellington in late October, and I’d like to mention the key role played by our Board Member Alastair Kenworthy in this event.
At the Expo, HL7 New Zealand was privileged to host a booth, jointly with HL7 Australia. This formed part of a strategy to work more closely with our trans-Tasman neighbours, but even more significantly served as an indication of the increasingly close relationship between the FHIR and SNOMED CT standards and their respective governing bodies.
This event, and the following week at the HINZ Conference left many of us with a very positive feeling that our sector is on the verge of a major breakthrough in terms of aligning the requisite elements for the collaborative effort needed to drive the exponential change requirements of Digital Health. One concrete manifestation of this spirit of cooperation will be the publication of NZHiT’s Interoperability Charter, later this month.
Those of us fortunate to have seen the Keynote Presentation by international expert Dr John Halamka in Wellington will have noted his declaration that NZ can be world leaders in digital health. Given that Dr Halamka has also recently described FHIR as the ‘HTML of healthcare’, everything points to 2017 being a pivotal year. Consequently, we at HL7 New Zealand are proposing to increase our engagement with the sector by working closely with those building FHIR-based APIs – so look out for news of upcoming workshops and seminars early in the New Year.
Before then, I hope that you all enjoy a well-earned Christmas and New Year break and return to work re-charged and ready to interoperate.
Best regards,Peter Jordan, Chairman HL7 New Zealand
Connectathon/Showcase events in 2017
IHE Australia and HISA announce a call for expressions of interest from healthcare IT vendors and professional healthcare organisations in New Zealand, Australia and the Asia/Pacific for participation in the Connectathon/Showcase events in 2017.
IHE Connectathons are cross-vendor, live, supervised and structured testing events where medical software industry members test implementations of IHE and other standards profiles. The Connectathon also serves as the pre-requisite development and testing ground for the Interoperability @ HIC 17 Showcase which occurs 6 weeks later. IHE Showcases are practical demonstrations of connectivity using live applications connected over a local network, following a “script” that showcases both vendor capability as well as the value of interoperability to patient care. This event is run in the exhibition hall at the HIC where in the past has reached the majority of conference attendees.
In 2017 a key focus will be medical device connectivity, along with IHE on FHIR, in addition to the full range of IHE and HL7 profiles supporting Health Information Exchange and individual health sector workflow. Kickoff Connectathon/Showcase Webinar Select the date you wish to attend on the GoToMeeting Site)
1. Monday 5th December2016 8am (Eastern Australia) – 4pm Sunday 4th December (Eastern US)
2. Tuesday 6th December 2016 8am (Eastern Australia) – 4pm Monday 5th December (Eastern US)
3. Wednesday 14th December 2016 8am Eastern Australia) – 4pm Tuesday 13th December (Eastern US)
Further information
http://ihe-australia.wikispaces.com/Connectathon+2017
Tour the virtual Showcase 13
http://ihe-australia.wikispaces.com/showcase+2013+handout+about+participants
Key dates:
Australian Connectathon 17: 3rd – 7th July 2017 – Adelaide
Interoperablity @ HIC 17Showcase: 6th – 9th August 2017 – Brisbane
Contact:
IHE Events: Peter MacIsaac admin@ihe.net.au +61 0411403462
2016 AGM
This years’ Annual General Meeting was held at Sky City Convention Centre, Monday 31 October at 4.30pm.Officer bearers appointed as of Monday 7th November include:Peter Jordan (Chairman), Peter Sergent (Vice Chairman), Edwin Ng (Treasurer), Linda McKay (Secretary). A newly created honour goes to outgoing Chairman David Hay (Chairman Emeritus) – David has Chaired the HL7NZ Board for the past eight years.
David Hay, HL7NZ Chairman Awarded this week
The winners of the Excellence in IT Awards 2016 were handed out in front of nearly 700 people at a gala event in Wellington on 12 July 2016. The eight Awards celebrate the individuals and teams that make up the industry and are a collaboration of 11 of New Zealand’s leading tech associations, to create a sector-wide awards programme. Partners include the Institute of IT Professionals, CITRENZ, TUANZ, Health Informatics NZ, itSMF NZ, NZ Software Association, GOVIS, Project Management Institute, InternetNZ, NZRise and the NZ Open Source Society.
The Excellence in Health Informatics was awarded to our own Chairman
Dr David Hay – for demonstrating a breadth of understanding of the Heath sector and has dedicated his entire career to bridging the role of clinician (he is a GP by training) with technology, with stunning results. Congratulations David.
HL7 Australia 2016 Plenary Working Group Meeting
6 JULY 2016 – 8 JULY 2016 Rydges Sydney Central, 28 Albion Street, Sydney NSW
Be part of history with the first 3 day HL7 Australia Working Group Meeting in Sydney 6, 7 & 8 July 2016, at Rydges Central. Attendees can get excellent room rates at the hotel – just mention you are attending the HL7 Australia Working Group Meeting!
Set to be a key event in the Australia Health Informatics community, the WGM brings together clinicians, software vendors, medical organisations and key government decision makers. The three day event provides opportunity to collaborate on draft e-health standards, network and share ideas with others within the community and attend a range of educational sessions.
(For more details http://www.hl7.org.au/events/hl7-australia-2016-plenary-working-group-meeting/)
SNOMED Expo 2016 – is coming to NZ in October this year
SNOMED Clinical Terminology enables the clear exchange of health information for all. It helps the healthcare professionals to save time, money and lives with its universal, codified, clinical terminology system. The SNOMED CT Expo 2016 is organised by the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) in collaboration with the New Zealand Ministry of Health.
The Expo showcases the latest achievements and cutting edge thinking in semantic interoperability, presented by thought leaders from around the globe. READ MORE Check out the latest info at these links below….
SNApp challenge and resources, including Patients First terminology server
DICOM Workshop in Sydney on 11-12 August 2016
For HL7 NZ Members interested in DICOM, a DICOM trainer Marco Kemper is offering a 2-day Workshop in Sydney on 11-12 August 2016 with CPD credits allocated by New Zealand Institute of Medical Radiation Technology. The registration period is until 10 June 2016.
For more details, please visit Marco’s website: http://dicom.workshopfor.me
Finding With FHIR – A Developers Guide to HL7 FHIR
Thank you to those who attended this informative event on 27 June 2016 which featured an international guest presenter Brian Postlethwaite. This event continued with the “FHIR and Ice” theme of our very successful FHIR and SNOMED seminars last year, and was aimed at the developer who wants to ‘get their hands dirty’ by creating and/or interfacing with FHIR APIs. Helping us is one of the international experts in FHIR – Brian Postlethwaite. Brian is a member of the FHIR core team, the FHIR Management Group and a co-chair for the Patient Administration working group in HL7. He is also one of the maintainers of the Open Source c# FHIR library.
Brian has deep experience in a number of areas especially the process around referrals – so we’re making the theme of this event how FHIR can support querying provider and services registries – an essential pre-requisite to sending a referral to the right place.
The programme consisted of:
- FHIR presentations focussing on topics of importance to developers i.e. .the c# library that can be used for both client and server development plus the java library which is designed in a very similar way.
- The practical aspects to consider when building a FHIR Server, and FHIR support of terminologies – especially SNOMED CT.
Presentations can be found at these links and the attachments below.
If you are interested in taking part in an event featuring subject / topics that affect you…let us know admin@hl7.org.nz
Clinical Genomics on FHIR – Innovative Healthcare
From an Akana Blog article by Laura Heritage on 10 February 2016:
“Gil Alterovitz from Harvard Medical School and the SMART on FHIR Genomics team have created a set of genetic specific profiles on top of the FHIR resources; Observation, Diagnostic Report, Diagnostic Order, FamilyMemberHistory, and Sequence. This allows applications that understand FHIR and the Genetics profiles, like the SMART Genomics apps to simply point to any FHIR servers that also implement the FHIR Genetics profiles to query and retrieve the data they need to embed it in EMRs and other applications. Below is an illustration of how these FHIR resources are related when used in conjunction with the Genetic Profiles.”
https://blog.akana.com/clinical-genomics-on-fhir-innovative-healthcare/
Festive Season’s Greetings from the Chairman
As the year draws to an end it is customary to reflect back on what was achieved during the year, and what the New Year may bring. From the perspective of healthcare standards (particularly HL7) this has been a great year! Internationally we have seen the new interoperability standard – FHIR – going from strength to strength with pretty much every country on the planet doing something with it, from real production deployments to pilots. We’ve also seen increasing co-operation between HL7 and other Standards Development Organizations such as IHTSDO (SNOMED), openEHR and CIMI in our objective to improve the delivery of care to the patient.
Locally, we’ve held a couple of well attended seminars – including one that was aimed at clinicians rather than implementers as we grappled with how to represent Adverse Drug Reactions in FHIR. I’m personally keen to get Clinicians and Business Analysts – and the educated Consumer – more involved. FHIR makes it easier than it has ever been to involve ‘non technical’ people in this important work, and it certainly helps that HISO and the National IT Board endorsed FHIR as an endorsed interoperability standard for new Zealand.
But it’s looking forward to next year that is the most exciting, as we seem to have a real convergence from different parts of the sector on interoperability. A perfect storm of activity.
From the national IT Board we had the announcement at HINZ of the ‘National EHR’ – a ‘longitudinal health record’ holding common data about people and supporting common functionality that is critical for the safe and effective delivery of healthcare. This will provide FHIR based API’s that application vendors can use for innovative applications using a common set of patient data and easy to use APIs. HISO is fully engaged in this process – expect to see some announcement of workshops and events soon! (and a very aggressive timeline…)
And from the vendor community we had the announcement that some of the larger and more forward looking vendors in New Zealand are intending to collaborate to deliver ‘precision medicine’ – an underpinning of which is the collection of structured, coded data that can serve as the basis of the analytics required to support this. It is hoped – and intended – that all vendors in New Zealand become engaged in this. Our very own ‘project Argonaut’.So enjoy the Christmas break, have a happy New Year and get ready for the adventure!
Dr David HayHL7NZ Chairman