Hello everyone:
I am offering my nomination for the role of HL7 Canada Affiliate Chair.
For those of you who I may not have had the opportunity of working with in the past, a bit of my history:
- I have had 15+ years of experience as a Canadian delegate to HL7 International, beginning in 1998 and concluding a few years ago when my role within Canada Health Infoway changed. As of April 2018 I am no longer an employee of Infoway, and I am currently an independent consultant.
- During my many years participating with HL7, I was an active member of the Modeling and Methodology Group, actively working on the HL7 v3 RIM. I was co-chair of the HL7 Architecture Review Board for 5 years and initial Chair of the HL7 FHIR Governance Board for one year. Each of these roles came with participation as a member of the HL7 Technical Steering Committee.
- I began as an enterprise architect with Canada Health Infoway in 2003, and during my various roles during my 15 years with Infoway I was a strong proponent of HL7 standards both within the organization and with our Canadian stakeholder community. I was the Accountable Director responsible for the Canadian Health Informatics Standards Needs Assessment project that resulted in the creation of the pan-Canadian Standards Collaborative, of which HL7-based work was a major component.
- As chief architect and accountable director for the EHRS Blueprint v2, I ensured HL7 standards were incorporated as part of the EHR interoperability profiles developed as part of the Blueprint. I was also subsequently the Chair and Accountable Director for the pan-Canadian EHR Clinical Interoperability Standards project. That project team, in collaboration with representatives of the clinical community, provided the initial set of HL7 v3.0 messaging standards for the EHR.
- In my last year of work with Infoway, my role came full-circle when I once again had the pleasure of working with the Infoway interoperability, terminology, and standards release centre team as a Group Director.
Looking forward to the future of HL7 Canada:
While much has been accomplished in establishing the foundation components of EHRs across Canada, much remains to be done in terms of allowing information to flow as it needs to in support of Canadians’ health and care.
In Canada, and internationally, HL7 FHIR® is the current focus for the development of new interoperable solutions. Having said that, there are still many HL7 CDA, V3 and V2 implementations across the country that are operating today, and those systems will also need to evolve to accommodate changes in technology and approaches to supporting the flow of information across care settings, disciplines, and organizational boundaries.
I believe the HL7 Canada community has an opportunity to inform and shape the priorities and approaches taken across the country to realizing full working interoperability in healthcare. It is apparent there is a need for the FHIR Working Group and the HL7 Community at large to be better integrated, especially as HL7 FHIR becomes a normative standard and regular iterative balloting of the standard becomes commonplace. However, I believe there is merit in continuing to support multiple working groups to address not just specific utilizations of FHIR, but also to provide insight on transitioning existing standards implementations to FHIR and other emerging standards. This includes the appropriate binding of terminology standards such as LOINC and SNOMED CT to achieve semantic interoperability inherently as part of technical interoperability.
In turn, the HL7 Canada Council will need to become more actively engaged in representing Canadian approaches and requirements to HL7, not just through balloting cycles, but also by understanding and influencing key HL7 working groups and the Technical Steering Committee.
With your support of my election to this position, I hope to be able to actively and meaningfully support the Canadian Health IT community in fulfilling the interoperability mission we set out on, transitioning from the EHR solutions foundation to digitally enabling health and care services across the country.
Thanks... Rp