Australia: FHIR repo now publicly available on GitHub

Good day everyone,

Members of the Infoway standards team have been engaging with the teams doing similar work in Australia.

Last week, we got this exciting email from AUS regarding their FHIR work and their Github repository.

Hello,

Thought I’d touch base and let you know that the public facing view of our (Clinical Informatics) FHIR STU3 repo is now accessible here: github.com/AuDigitalHealth/ci-fhir-stu3.

The repository is a collection of early working drafts of FHIR®, Release 3 (STU) artefacts to enable development and design in a collaborative, open and transparent process in partnership with standards organisations and industry. The contents of this repository include:
• FHIR implementation guides
• FHIR profiles, extensions and examples
• Files necessary to build the FHIR implementation guides

It’s a work in progress but a nice start in making our content and process transparent and open. An official Agency release announcement is forthcoming.




We asked a couple of additional questions, one of them being about balloting and adding an "HL7 Australia stamp of approval" like the Netherlands does, and here is the response in the follow up email:

In terms of balloting local realm content that is very much the process in Australia. Australia has a HL7 AU Australian Base Profiles implementation guide that defines the localised structures including terminology, identifiers, extensions, guidance etc.

There are programs of work by various parties which ‘derive’ off that base content and profile for their particular implementations e.g. add constraints, must support, etc. Those programs feed their content back into the Australian Base Profiles implementation guide as they go. At periodic intervals the HL7 AU Australian Base Profiles implementation guide goes through a ballot process: Standards Development Process.

Some of the programs running at the moment include:
• an Australian Argonaut flavour (see IG)
• National Child Health Data Hub program
o funded by government
o run via government
o developing a pilot for using FHIR natively for a centralised hub of all child records which will have an implementation guide (see IG)
• Primary Care data quality program
o funded by the government
o run via a join government and vendor working group
o developing an implementation guide to support primary care (first usage scenario to support is practice-to-practice transfer of a patient record) (see IG)
• Secure Messaging program
o funded by the government
o run via a HL7 AU supported vendor working group
o implemented (and continue to maintain) a provider directory implementation guide and API for secure messaging (see IG)
• Clinical Informatics at the Agency (us) – who are responsible for authoring and maintaining national agreed specifications for supported content across Australia both in P2P and P2Share (implemented in the My Health Record);
o funded by government
o run via government
o We support multiple IGs in a single repository – the type of content we have to support is directed by our Federal Dept of Health
o Final approved content is published as a finalised spec and implemented
o Currently only one FHIR IG on medicare records has progressed to that state (see IG) – all other existing approved and implemented content is V2 or CDA as was original direction for Australia

Theoretically each program’s content should all align with everyone deriving from the Base Australian Profiles implementation guide and providing content via the feedback loop. And anyone else building using the Base Australia implementation guide should also align.

There are four common mechanisms for feeding content into the HL7 AU Australia base implementation guide:
• Join a HL7 AU working group and submit content / feedback
o content can be submitted directly via the GitHub repository for adoption and maturation
• Raise an issue on the HL7 AU content via the issue function in the GitHub repository
• Submit issues or feedback via the ‘Issues & Feedback’ button available on each page of the implementation guide (see bottom right corner of the html page)
• Submit feedback during the ballot process

All feedback is triaged and responded to by the relevant working group(s).

We are very happy for you to promote our work, and any of the work being undertaken in Australia. International co-ordination and interoperability is something we strongly support. We would love to be able to provide material for others to use, and to use material where others have already done the hard work.


Please take a look. It would be great to see if this work and the associated processes could be leveraged here in Canada. What AUS is doing is so similar to what we are working to achieve here.

Thank you.

Regards,

Andrea