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
2016 Board Elected
Congratulating the following Office Bearers and Board members – read more
- David Hay (Chairman)
- Peter Jordan (Vice Chairman)
- Peter Sergent (Treasurer)
- Jane Farris (Secretary)
- Dave Fallas
- Edwin Ng
- Ray Murakami
- Martin Entwistle
- Chris Peck
- Koray Atalag
- Alastair Kenworthy
HL7NZ Annual General Meeting 2015
Was held on Friday 20th November 2015. Minutes as attachment below. We welcome the incoming Board and Office Bearers for 2016.
“Light up the sky with Epic FHIRworks”…
| There’s nothing like a developer event to get the crowd fired up. At least that’s how the hosts and the keynote speaker at the FHIRWorks’ event at the Epic campus last week described it. READ MORE |
Interview with Grahame Grieve
Some particularly interesting comments about clinical interoperability see HERE
HL7 Australia Events
Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and HL7 Terminology.
If you want to get up to speed with FHIR, mark June 17 in your diary. Grahame Grieve, the father of FHIR, has generously donated a day to tell the HL7 Australia Community about this world-wide phenomenon that he kicked off a few short years ago in Melbourne. He will be ably assisted by David Hay, Chair of HL7 New Zealand, member of the FHIR International Governance Board and leader of the FHIR implementation efforts in New Zealand.
FHIR represents a fundamental change in Health IT and a huge opportunity for Australia. In order to make this day as accessible as possible, there will be no charge for current members but it will be “no frills”! Generous support by CSIRO (venue) and the speakers has made this possible.
As part of this day, HL7 Australia will be initiating the process to localise FHIR requirements (profiles) for Australia.
At the end of the day there will be a brief update about other HL7 Standards initiatives from attendees at the recent HL7 International meeting.
Day 2 – June 18 will have two streams – a FHIR Connectathon for developers and implementers with Grahame Grieve as presiding oracle.
In parallel there will be a tutorial on Terminology by Heather Grain, Co-Chair of the HL7 International Vocabulary Working Group, Chair HL7 Terminology Authority, Convenor ISO TC215 WG3 (Terminology). The focus will be on implementation of terminology across the full range of HL7 standards including current tooling and near-future initiatives.
To Register: http://ehe.edu.au/events/33/hl7-australia-the-way-forward-symposium-and-tutorials/
Festive greetings from HL7 New Zealand
Once again it is my pleasure to wish you the compliments of the season on behalf of HL7NZ
It has certainly been an exciting year for Healthcare interoperability both internationally and within New Zealand. When I wrote last year, I talked about how the new HL7 FHIR standard was showing great promise, and during this year it has matured swiftly. Currently in a ‘DSTU’ stage (Draft Standard for Trial Use), it has already been adopted by many organizations and countries world wide, with the most recent activity being that a number of the larger American PMS vendors are directly funding the development effort (Project Argonaut) – it’s hard to imagine a better show of confidence than that!
Here in New Zealand we have hosted a couple of seminars – the most recent being at the HINZ conference where we were privileged to have Josh Mandel – lead architect for the SMART project – talk to us. This is another ‘leading edge’ standard which is part of the FHIR effort, and keeps New Zealand at the forefront of these important new developments.
Next year we intend to follow on from the Application Showcase at the recent HINZ Workshop, by hosting more practically-focused events including a connectathon. I’d also like to call out an event being sponsored by the University of Auckland – the ‘HealthCare’ hackathon – which will see developers creating real applications to help solve health care issues. More details here
So.. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, trust that you have a Happy New Year, and look forward to an exciting 2015!
Dr David Hay
HL7NZ Chairman
HL7NZ Annual General Meeting 2014
The 2014 AGM was held on Monday 10th November at Sky City Convention Centre in Auckland
openEHR and HL7 New Zealand Statement of Collaboration
Added link to the openEHR NZ page according to “openEHR and HL7 New Zealand Statement of Collaboration” signed on the 19 March 2012.
“HL7 New Zealand and the openEHR Foundation recognise the importance of developing Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems which are interoperable in New Zealand. Both parties agree that both organisations provide crucial input and facilities in this area and that close collaboration is required to achieve this goal.”
The link to the full PDF document of the statement can be found here.
Find us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter
To make HL7 NZ more social, we added links to our Facebook page and Twitter account on Contact page and the side menu bar.