OHT Digital Health Playbook

Hi,

On today's FHIR WG call we agreed to start a thread to capture comments the community wants to share with the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care regarding the API policy in the Digital Health Playbook. The policy starts on page 56 of the playbook available from the link below:
health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/connectedcare/oht/docs/dig_health_playbook_en.pdf

Here's a few of the comments we captured on today's call and we invite others to add on. For those attending FHIR North on Oct. 16th, several of us are hoping to have a quick meeting to further discuss our comments. We'll review the collected comments on the October FHIR WG call and look to submit them to the MOHLTC shortly after.

Comments captured to date:
As the policy and industry evolves, we'd like to see the policy become more precise and potentially prescriptive about how investments in healthcare data related APIs, for example it could state that the investments should be in technologies that support FHIR APIs for both data contribution (data in) and consumption (data out). We've observed that many applications are designed as a terminus/end point for data going in, but in the ecosystem required to support OHTs most applications will need to also support data going out.

Another area it could be more precise would be state that healthcare data related API investments should support the Canadian Baseline FHIR profiles once they have been approved. Rationale, stating support "FHIR" is a bit too loose. In many ways the the Canadian Baseline is intended to be a minimum data set that products sold/implemented in Canada can declare support for.

Even with common profiles, implementers could arrive at valid yet different implementations. Once ready, the policy could refer back to some of the work eHealth Ontario is doing with respect to establishing conformance guidance.

The eReferral substream has gone quite a bit farther and has established profiles and architectures to support eReferral The policy could be more precise about investments in referral solutions supporting this work.

Thanks,

Gavin