The Aotearoa NZ Interoperability Lab (ANZIL) is Aotearoa New Zealand’s contribution to the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL).
As part of our collaboration with AeHIN and the global OpenMRS Open Source community, S23M has sponsored and launched the Aotearoa NZ Interoperability Lab on 1 October 2021. Our initial focus is interoperability based on HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and the IPS (International Patient Summary), building on the capabilities of S23M’s Care Platform and OpenMRS, a comprehensive and well-supported Open Source electronic health record system that is used by more than 5,500 healthcare facilities in over 40 countries to provide improved healthcare to 12.6 million patients.
The IPS standard covers relevant metadata (record author, attester, data custodian) as well as essential health data (medication summary, allergies and intolerances, problem list, immunisations, history of procedures, medical devices, diagnostic results) and further optional data sets.
The Smart on FHIR standard ensures that the same integration code can interface with any other health IT systems, such as Cerner, Epic and other proprietary EMR systems, practice management software, laboratory systems, financial, and billing systems, among others, which also support the same FHIR resource types and APIs.
We are inviting local communities, Māori health service providers, primary health organisations, the Māori Health Authority, Health NZ, and health IT solution vendors to join the Aotearoa NZ Interoperability Lab and to use its capabilities, in particular in relation to the reliable exchange of vaccination status information and other essential information relating to public health.
Capabilities
The Aotearoa NZ Interoperability Lab is rolling out the following capabilities in October and November 2021:
- An OpenMRS interoperability test environment and test data set that is available on demand, from within the user interface of the S23M Care Platform
- The ability to browse, create, and edit IPS data in OpenMRS
- On demand data transfer/sync from OpenMRS into the Care Platform
- The ability to browse IPS data in the Care Platform
- On demand access to a FHIR based and IPS focused API to extract and import data
Further capabilities will be made available based on demand from Interoperability Lab members.
S23M
S23M is a company with best-of-breed solutions based on unique insights into human factors and a deep understanding of the patient journey, from initial presentation to a primary care provider to quaternary level care and well beyond. S23M’s offers both meaningful co-design with local communities and collaborative education to support all the healthcare practitioners who are involved in delivering integrated healthcare, enabling knowledge to flow to all the places where it can be put to good use.
S23M’s commitment to open standards based health system interoperability is the foundation of comprehensive healthcare sector specific system integration and interoperability services. S23M’s Care Platform technology integrates distributed systems via the SNOMED-CT compliant interoperability standards stipulated by national and regional health authorities. This means data quality challenges can be reduced significantly, and as a result, the number of mistakes in diagnostics and patient care can be reduced correspondingly. The Care Platform supports open REST (for non-clinical data) and FHIR/REST APIs (for clinical data) for integration, with OAuth2 (2 factor authentication where needed) as the security layer.
OpenMRS
All integrations between S23M’s healthcare product lines and OpenMRS are done via the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard and the IPS (International Patient Summary) standard. These industry standards facilitate seamless information exchange between healthcare service providers, whilst respecting the limits imposed by patient controlled health data access privileges and regionally applicable data governance policies.
Community of Interoperability Labs
The Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL) is organized as a forum to learn from each other and disseminating new knowledge and research across borders and within their own countries. Spearheaded in parallel are in-country interoperability labs intended to build capacity within countries to build, acquire, and implement those artifacts in operational environments – the clinics, hospitals, program offices, etc. These labs will become the go-to places for various stakeholders in the countries for testing, tooling, training, and teaching on interoperability of electronic information systems.
Inquiries
If your organisation is interested in becoming a member of the Aotearoa New Zealand Interoperability Lab and in accessing the capabilities of the lab, please submit your inquiry using the form below.
