FHIR® NORTH - A marked interest in the emerging standard in Canadian Health

FHIR® North 2017 was a resounding success! This year Canada Health Infoway was honoured to support Mohawk College as a sponsor along with the Digital Health Solutions and Innovations Branch of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, Gevity and UHN.

As a sign of the impact FHIR is making in Canada, the program reflected a combination of sessions for beginners, experienced developers and executives, implementer updates and the Connectathon. An unprecedented number of 250 participants gathered to discuss, learn about and observe the HL7 FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard with its growing significance and benefits in addressing Canadian healthcare interoperability challenges. Attila Farkas, Infoway’s Director of FHIR strategy and implementation, introduced Infoway’s Canadian FHIR repository, providing discovery, reuse, comparison of capability statements, generation of client side APIs, and other value added functions. This repository of capability statements, along with Infoway’s FHIR tooling, may be found and accessed through Infoway’s collaboration platform, InfoCentral, under InfoScribe, InfoAPI, Terminology Gateway respectively. This latest tooling support has been developed to provide smoother, more efficient and ultimately accelerated, implementations.

The cornerstone of FHIR North; the “Connecthaton” provided the opportunity to test and evaluate FHIR-enabled applications. Mohawk students showcased the ease of FHIR use by demonstrating rapidly built patient workflow apps along with others using the standard including: UHN, Medchart, Aegis, Intelliware, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, and Ontario Lab Information System (OLIS) Health Drug Repository and Digital Health Immunization Repository in an afternoon of “real world” testing.

To learn more about FHIR in the Canadian context, join Infoway’s FHIR Implementation Working Group, access FHIR related tooling, read a clinician’s view point on the benefits of FHIR for health care in Canada, or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information.