Last week marked the first time AEGIS participated in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Symposium in Washington, DC. AMIA members, students, practitioners, informatics researchers, industry partners, and others interested in the rapidly emerging field of informatics participated in the three day event filled with a plethora of panels and presentations. We were intrigued by AMIA’s view and implementation of standards-based testing that enables members of the global health informatics community to learn about the importance of health information interoperability, the contribution of health informatics standards, the contributions of key standards development organizations, and the challenges of developing good standards that work well together.
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Karen DeSalvo, MD stated that, “Groups like AMIA should step in and lead on interoperability.” ONC adopted a recommendation from its JASON task force in its recent draft of its 10-year roadmap toward interoperability. It recommends that Stage 3 of meaningful use include public APIs. The first such API likely would be Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a standard being developed by Health Level Seven International. At the Symposium, developers and backers of public application programming interfaces (APIs) discussed how the standard could speed interoperability with add-on apps to enterprise EHRs, and help make those bulky systems more nimble.
HL7 and AEGIS have partnered to offer the HL7 Conformance Testing Program which helps healthcare IT developers speed time to market by providing a cost-effective platform for ongoing, iterative testing of conformance and interoperability with HL7 standards. AEGIS has developed our WildFHIR® reference implementation (RI) for use with the AEGIS DIL in testing HL7’s FHIR® standard. Check out the links and follow us on Twitter (@AEGIS.net) for more details….