Telstra Health unveiled Australias first FHIR-native data platform in February this year in an exclusive partnership with Smile Digital Health that is set to change the healthcare connectivity landscape across Australia and New Zealand.
Telstra HealthsHealth Information Exchange(HIE) solutions, powered bySmile Digital Healths HL7 FHIR first Health Data Platform, offers an open, cohesive and vendor-neutral environment to streamline communication and interoperability between healthcare organisations and citizens.
Heeding the call for FHIR based interfaces
The launch of Telstra Healths HIE coincided with the release of the Australian Digital Health Agencys (ADHA)National Healthcare Interoperability Plan 2023-2028, a five-year roadmap outlining how the Australian Government plans to facilitate information sharing across the health system in a more seamless, user friendly and accessible way.
To achieve the vision of a connected digital health ecosystem, the ADHA recommends taking a health information exchange-based approach to the national digital health infrastructure. This involves plans to move My Health Record to a modern FHIR-enabled personal health record system.
According to the Plan, outdated technical specifications and standards cannot support real-time data sharing, which is why the ADHA recommends using FHIR-based interfaces to build an architecture and framework that is fit for this purpose.