HL7 Announces Winners of FHIR Applications Roundtable

Health Level Seven International (HL7), the global authority for interoperability in HIT and home to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, recently announced the winners of the second FHIR applications roundtable, an event focused on showcasing FHIR-based solutions in use in today's health care industry. The organization also announced that the presentation slides and video recordings are now freely available to view on the HL7 website. The HL7 FHIR Applications Roundtable was held at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina on March 7-8, 2017, and highlighted 39 FHIR-based solutions available today.

"HL7 has been committed to providing standards that empower global health data interoperability for the past 30 years and FHIR, is truly a game changer. FHIR is more than an emerging standard; it is real today and in use by major players across health care on a global scale," says HL7 CEO Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD. "The roundtable demonstrated solutions that harness the power of FHIR to rapidly develop working interoperable solutions. We are seeing hundreds of implementers incorporating FHIR into their products now, with more each day."

The solutions ranged from the VA Digital Health Platform, a public-private collaboration which demonstrates the capability to obtain patient data from disparate military and commercial electronic records systems, to patient-facing SMART on FHIR smartphone apps intended to make health care data more visually accessible to patients and caregivers. The event also featured apps focused on disease management and health maintenance intended to improve quality of life as well as infrastructure components and tools to support application development. Presentations included innovative solutions from the University of Utah and Green Circle Health, as well as Sync4Science, Duke University, Cambia Health, McKesson, and RelayHealth among others. Video recordings and PDF slides of the presentations are freely available on the HL7 website at www.hl7.org/events/fhir/roundtable/2017/03/final.presentations.cfm.

Mark Braunstein, MD, a professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech notes that "FHIR is both the long sought technology platform for care coordination across the community and a 'universal health app platform' that can spur innovation. The meeting amply demonstrated that both are occurring and growing exponentially in the real world of commercial enterprises." 

Attendees were asked to vote for their favorite FHIR-based solutions each day of the event. Six presenters were recognized for their innovative products, as follows:

Day One: 

• First place: Applicadia, presented by Richard Esmond from PenRad
• Second place: SyntheticMass and Synthea, presented by Jason Walonoski, The MITRE Corporation
• Third place: RIMIDI: Predictive Analytics for Diabetes, presented by Lucie Ide, MD, PhD, RIMIDI

Day Two: 

• First place: HSPC Sandbox, presented by Rick Freeman, The Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC)
• Second place tie: Aidbox, presented by Pavel Smirnov, Health Samurai; Iris Chatbox, presented by Chris Sprague, Leap Frog Technology

Following the conclusion of the HL7 FHIR Applications Roundtable, attendees were asked to vote for the Best in Show, which was awarded to Esmond, chief technology officer at PenRad for Applicadia. He remarked, "We are honored that Applicadia won Best in Show among dozens of application developers that leveraged FHIR to create real-world solutions to current interoperability challenges. These applications demonstrate the ability of FHIR, along with complementary standards, to completely transform health care systems." He continued, "Applicadia is a conversational speech clinical reporting platform which uses FHIR web-service APIs and SMART on FHIR to bring hands-free charting capabilities to the health care ecosystem. It will allow clinicians to spend more time with patients and less on the electronic medical records system. Speech recognition and natural language processing are reaching critical-mass and will soon become the common denominator for a variety of clinical applications."

The complete program and listing of presentations is available at www.hl7.org/events/fhir/roundtable/2017/03/presentations.cfm.

Source: Health Level Seven International