Report-out from our first pan-Canadian Projectathon

Let me add my heartfelt congratulations as well!! It was a great event... I hope we see more like it. Thanks for taking the time to report out, Derek.

Hi there IHE Canada community. So... big news: last week marked a significant milestone in Canada's digital health journey!

Over the course of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (March 21-23) -- participants completed the first ever pan-Canadian Projectathon. Engineers from Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, SmileCDR and JuniperCDS tested:

• the pan-Canadian patient summary content profile (PS-CA, based on the International Patient Summary (IPS) specification),
• IHE's cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS.b) and mobile Health Documents (MHD) content sharing specifications, and
• companion specifications such as Consistent Time (CT), Audit Trail and Node Authentication (ATNA), and patient identity exchange for HL7 v3 (PIXv3).

Also in the mix, Projectathon participants tested the brand new, 100% made-in-Canada, 100% FHIR-based, CA:FeX (Canadian FHIR document exchange) profile. This spec is designed for green-field situations where there is not a requirement to support legacy CDA-based document exchange. It gives implementers a conformance-testable, pure-FHIR document exchange option. Very cool!

For those not familiar with the nomenclature, a Projectathon is a peer testing event similar to a Connectathon. Both leverage the IHE Gazelle platform to support the definition and management of conformance tests and test results. Unlike a Connectathon, however, Projectathons are jurisdiction-specific and test nationalized versions of IHE profiles as well as domestically-developed specifications (such as CA:FeX, for example).

Last week also marked another important milestone. The public comment periods closed on Friday for both PS-CA and CA:FeX. The next step in the evolution for these two domestic specifications will be to disposition comments and publish trial implementation versions of the specs.

Video recordings of the Projectathon read-out sessions are available at the Patient Summaries InfoCentral folder, here . These four sessions make for fascinating (and candid) viewing. They cover, respectively:

1. an introduction to PS-CA and CA:FeX and implementer experience in testing these new specifications at the Projectathon;
2. an introduction to the PS-CA reference architecture, plus a technical refresher on the OAuth-based Internet User Authentication (IUA) profile. This was followed by a quick demonstration, by JuniperCDS and SmileCDR, showing how a SMART on FHIR based reference implementation can support the real-time generation of PS-CA documents which can then be leveraged to operationalize FHIR-based computable care guidelines. The demo set the table for a super-interesting engineering discussion about real-world experiences implementing FHIR-based solutions.
3. implementer experience with large-scale document exchange, both using the mature XDS and CDA models, and using FHIR. This discussion was filled with insights.
4. clinicians' requirements and the ways their inputs informed the development of the pan-Canadian specifications and reference implementation. This excellent session was facilitated by Dr. Darren Larsen and it surfaced very helpful insights from the vendor community and the non-trivial challenges in ensuring clinicians get the content they need (not more, not less).

It requires a bit of a time commitment to view all four videos, but I wholeheartedly recommend it -- there is real gold, there. For those who don't mind everyone sounding like a chipmunk, you can always view them at 2x speed. Entertaining and informative... all at once!

The IHE methodology was leveraged in developing PS-CA and CA:FeX, and IHE profiles and the Gazelle tools played a foundational role in supporting this inaugural Projectathon. As a community, we should be proud of the ways IHE's global public goods are being leveraged to help move Canada's national agenda forward. Warm congratulations to the Infoway team, to all the participating vendors, and to the IHE Catalyst support team, for this successful launch!

Stay safe and well, everyone!
Derek