The American Medical Informatics Association and Health Level Seven International on Tuesday announced a new partnership to drive efforts to broaden use of comprehensive standards for healthcare interoperability and information exchange.

WHY IT MATTERS
The two-year collaboration will see AMIA's informatics professionals working with HL7 to promote interoperability specifications such as FHIR, making standards and implementation guides available to healthcare stakeholders.

AMIA and HL7 have collaborated before over the past several years, such as with the FHIR Application Competition held the last four years at the AMIA Annual Symposium.

Winners of the most recent app competition include:

• First Place: Ken Kawamoto – Disease Manager

• Second Place: Subha Airan-Javia – Bringing FHIR to the Bedside: An EHR Connected Mobile Application to Bring Real-Time Clinical Data Coupled with a User-First Team Collaboration Platform to the Point of Care

• Third Place: Ajay Dharod – Involving Patients Using FHIR

The next competition will take place at  AMIA 2022 Annual Symposium, scheduled for November 5-9, in Washington, D.C.  The contest submission site is open through August 2.

THE LARGER TREND
A recent report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT found big differences between solo and large practice physicians when it came to information exchange capabilities, and noted that a fragmented EHR market is driving an interoperability divide.

In a recent HIMSSCast interview, Google Cloud's Aashima Gupta and Joe Miles discussed interoperability's role in the healthcare ecosystem –  the future of hybrid care, and what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about data silos.

ON THE RECORD
"AMIA and HL7 have a long history of collaborating together," said AMIA Board Chair and President Dr. Gretchen Purcell Jackson, scientific medical officer and professor of surgery, pediatrics and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

"As an organization of members who created and implemented technologies for the electronic health record," she added, "our partnership with HL7 is essential in moving forward with advancing health and healthcare with standards for interoperability."

"As a longtime member of AMIA, I see collaboration as essential to advancing interoperability across the stakeholders," said HL7 CEO Dr. Charles Jaffe. "HL7 and FHIR have become global resources and working alongside AMIA will bring us closer to our mutual goals of ensuring healthcare and health information technology are efficient and effective."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.