HANOI, Viet Nam – The Standards and Interoperable Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia) participated in the Health Level Seven International – Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7-FHIR) Data Modeling Workshop for the Electronic Health Administration (EHA), Ministry of Health Viet Nam with support from the Asian Development Bank last 25-27 July 2018 in Hanoi, Viet Nam.

Prof. Philip Zuniga, SIL-Asia Technical Lead, and Dr Raymond Sarmiento, SIL-Asia FHIR/Terminology Expert, provided expert insights during the three-day workshop facilitated by HL7-FHIR core member, James Agnew.

This proposed primary use cases where FHIR will be implemented in the Ministry of Health Viet Nam are the (1) interoperability between local commune electronic medical records (EMRs) and the national electronic health record (EHR); and (2) interoperability between EHR and DHIS2 for national disease surveillance and health statistics. The HL7-FHIR Data Modeling workshop demonstrated how these use cases can be achieved using various modes of architectures.

The workshop also served as an avenue to discuss the possibility of benchmarking the FHIR HAPI server as an interoperability layer that can replace the enterprise service bus (ESB) in the OpenHIE architecture.

SIL-Asia also organized side-meetings with EHA to help them further build capacities for the Viet Nam Interoperability Lab. Aside from testing, EHA will also focus on the non-testing aspects of their lab, such as the DHIS2-FHIR integration and FHIR training for hospitals. With this regard, SIL-Asia is set to develop an HL7-FHIR-starter toolkit with training modules which can be used by countries in the region like Viet Nam.

More information about SIL-Asia’s teaming with Viet Nam is available here.

For more information, SIL-Asia’s briefer on HL7-FHIR is available here. SIL-Asia’s FHIR server may also be accessed for testing purposes.

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).