MANDALUYONG, Philippines – The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia) convened sixteen delegates from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Viet Nam in the SIL-Asia Health Enterprise Architecture Framework (HEAF) workshop supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) last 7-9 August 2018 at the ADB headquarters. The workshop was facilitated by Ms. Iryna Roy, health enterprise architect from Gevity Consulting in Canada.
Past workshops organized by the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) made countries in the region realize that simply having standards or building blocks is not enough to achieve interoperability; an enterprise architecture or blueprint is critical to articulate business needs that shall drive the requirements for digital health implementations, particularly health information exchange.
The HEAF workshop was organized by SIL-Asia to build on the knowledge, experiences, and best practices of countries in developing a health enterprise architecture framework for regional adoption. SIL-Asia recognized that it is important for countries to have an architecture framework that will define the structure, operations, and relationships of stakeholders involved in health interoperability.
The three-day workshop focused on health enterprise business architecture for health information exchange, specifically in primary point of service/health facility, insurance support, infrastructure support, secondary/tertiary health support, analytics, data use, and public health reporting. It took into account health information systems maturity cycle, and the use of new and existing technologies for health, such as HL7-FHIR, IHE, Blockchain, and DHIS2.
The HEAF workshop guided countries in planning, designing, implementing, and scaling digital health as an established intervention or strategy for universal health care. Workshop output highlighted case studies and lessons learned from participating countries in regional health enterprise architecture principles and framework for interoperability. This will be based on a maturity model approach with reference to health priorities and strategies.
Results of the HEAF workshop will be presented at the forthcoming 6th AeHIN General Meeting and Conference on Interoperability for Universal Health Coverage in Colombo, Sri Lanka next month. The presentation will consolidate best practices, challenges, and status from select identified countries and other architecture models. It will describe the value of having a health enterprise architecture for a data-driven and data use-enabled health information exchange.
Overall, the HEAF workshop outlines key principles for health enterprise architecture framework development for health systems of developing member countries (DMCs) in Asia. This includes the necessary functional and non-functional requirements of a regional enterprise architecture tailor-fit to the health landscape of countries in Asia. It aims to guide ministries of health and other relevant stakeholders for further HEAF development and pilot testing.
For more information, SIL-Asia’s briefer on HEAF is available here.
The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia is a regional health interoperability laboratory powered by the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) and supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with sponsorship from The People’s Republic of China Poverty Reduction and Regional Cooperation Fund (PRC Fund).
The concept for the Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia was first conceived at the Regional Interoperability Workshop organized by AeHIN in Manila last August 2015 at the sidelines of the Global Health Research Forum. The regional lab was designed to serve as a template of labs in each country that will later form into the Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL).
