WHO and HL7 Collaborate on Adopting Global Interoperability

The World Health Organization signed an agreement with HL7 to jointly develop guidelines and advance the adoption of open interoperability standards, which WHO says are critical to the development of equitable and evidence-based digital health Are.

why it matters

As part of its global digital health strategy, “to provide global guidance on adopting interoperability standards from WHO and how WHO clinical, public health and data guidance can be translated into digital health systems” has been invoked.” Post on your website on July 3rd.

According to the agreement posted online by WHO, the expected outcome of the collaboration with Health Level Seven International is to provide HL7 FHIR-enabled replaceable medical applications and reusable technology guidelines with multilingual support at no cost.

Smart patient data exchange standards were included in the 21st Century Cures Act, funded by the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

WHO said in the attached project description that it will lead the standards setting for health content and the SMART guideline development process, coordinate and identify member states’ needs, and ensure the correct representation of WHO-FIC classification and terminology within HL7.

HL7 will create the technical mechanism for the FHIR-based standards and translate them into the six official languages ​​of the UN – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish – and obtain an exclusive license from WHO.

“WHO grants to HL7 a perpetual and irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable license to use such jointly produced work or parts thereof for public health purposes.”

big trend

HL7 has collaborated with other organizations over the past several years to advance health data interoperability, including healthcare organizations such as Evernorth and Siemens Healthineers to test the use of the FHIR Accelerator CodeX for prior authorizations in oncology.

Last year, HL7 partnered with the American Medical Informatics Association on a similar two-year collaboration to promote interoperability standards and provide implementation guides for healthcare providers and stakeholders.

“As an organization of members creating and implementing technologies for electronic health records, our partnership with HL7 is essential to advancing health and healthcare with standards for interoperability,” said AMIA Board President and Chairman said Dr. Gretchen Purcell Jackson, Scientist. medical officer and professor of surgery, pediatrics and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in that announcement.

At HIMSS23, Dr. Donald Rucker, former National Coordinator for Health IT, discusses the recent ‘dynamite’ of FHIR Healthcare IT Newsdiscusses with Dr. Kenneth Mandel how FHIR, with its bulk access programming interface, can help healthcare organizations better manage their data and track their performance.

The SMART/HL7 Bulk FHIR “enables push-button access to patient-level data across patient populations,” Mandal said.

On the record

“The two sides agree that a coordinated collaboration can advance interoperability to improve global health,” WHO and HL7 said in the agreement.

Andrea Fox is a senior editor for Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.