If you put enough smart people together in one space, good things happen.
– Erik Hersman
SWSPHN has been given a seat at the table of a cutting-edge CSIRO initiative to enhance digitisation of healthcare.
On the back of iRAD, our own interoperability solution to deliver instant access to patient information with secure, simplified workflows, Digital Health and Data Manager Nick McGhie has joined the Sparked Clinical Design Group (CDG).
Run by CSIRO’s Australian eHealth Research Centre, Sparked is a community of government representatives, technology vendors, provider organisations, peak bodies, practitioners and domain experts.
It was established to accelerate the creation and use of national FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards in healthcare information exchange.
The CDG comprises key stakeholders with expertise and experience in clinical practice and others with health industry and practice knowledge, to work together to develop and validate artefacts for the Sparked FHIR Accelerator Core AU program, including the Australian core data sets (AUCDI).
Mr McGhie was invited to talk at the CDG kick-off meeting in Sydney. He presented the “Local/PHN reporting data vision”, highlighting the benefits of a common data model from a population health data perspective.
SWSPHN relies on data for most of our programs and planning, including: iRAD; partnerships; codesign and commissioning services to meet the needs of the community; evaluation and reporting; and workforce planning.
Mr McGhie explained some of the current in-house challenges, including data quality (unmatched and uncoded, reliance on third party to cleanse and harmonise), siloed regional data, and delayed or missing “chunks of” data.
Looking to the future, he talked about building on what SWSPHN was already doing well: more automated data pipelines; better insights; and data linkages.
SWSPHN, as a member of the CDG, is showing support for and being involved in the acceleration of FHIR standards in Australia.
IRAD uses the FHIR AU base in the exchange of health information from Best Practice and Medical Director. The Sparked group is expanding this to FHIR AU Core.
The Clinical Design Group’s aims are:
- validate and define the data elements of the Australian Core Data Set (AUCDI) and eRequest CDI against the agreed use cases
- validate the value sets required for the AUCDI and FHIR Implementation Guides
- provide clinical requirements into the development and validation of the Core AU and eRequesting FHIR Implementation Guide
The CDG is always open to interested software developers, clinicians or domain experts.
You can find more information about Sparked here.
CAPTION: SWSPHN CEO, Dr Keith McDonald PhD, Nick McGhie and SWSPHN Director of Innovation and Partnerships Kristen Short discuss iRAD.