The Australian Digital Health Agency is collaborating with Health Level Seven Australia to support the consistent adoption of digital health standards across Australia's health system.

The organisations recently signed a memorandum of understanding to improve connectivity across the national healthcare system.

According to a media release, the partnership aims to foster a "vibrant" Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) community in Australia. They will also support the standards community to grow in size and expertise while "more clearly" communicating requirements for standards for national acceptance across public and private health and social care.

Moreover, they will provide training, education, and uplift activities to assist health workers in using the new standards.

Additionally, the organisations will continue supporting the widely-used V2 and CDA standards in the transition to FHIR.

WHY IT MATTERS

ADHA CEO Amanda Cattermole says digital health standards have a key role to play in enabling interoperability in the health system. "Digital health standards are critical to the safe, secure and seamless movement of consumer health information between different healthcare providers," she stressed.

ADHA's partnership with HL7 will ensure that digital health standards are "robustly developed, easily adopted, widely available, well maintained and effectively governed" to enable the movement of consumer health information through a connected healthcare system.

This partnership will also create a "new era" of digital health in Australia with strong governance, enabling "open and collaborative" processes around the development and implementation of digital health standards.

"[I]t presents an opportunity for our community to help nurture new partnerships across health and social care in the interests of achieving a consensus approach to the development of the standards we use in Australia," added HL7 Australia chairperson Isobel Frean.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

The ADHA is currently developing the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan, which envisions a more connected Australian health system by 2027. It started working on getting a consensus on interoperability standards in 2019.

In its National Digital Health Strategy, the ADHA expects that by this year, some health regions will start showcasing comprehensive interoperability across their services. A noteworthy example is the South Western Sydney Primary Health Network, which has already connected 70 care sites via Altera Digital Health's interoperability platform dbMotion with plans to add 40 more sites by yearend.