VIRTUAL – Twenty-five participants attended SIL-Asia’s webinar on ‘Interoperability of Health Facilities’ last April 14, 2021 via Zoom. In this webinar, SIL-Asia Technical Director, Prof. Philip Christian Zuniga talked about requirements and models that should be adopted by health facilities in order to participate in an interoperable health ICT ecosystem.
In a nutshell, the webinar explained the two types of interoperability in health facilities – internal interoperability and external interoperability.
For external interoperability, the country, based on the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) law should be able to set up a healthcare delivery network. In this provision, every Filipino should also have a primary care physician. This implies that whichever primary care provider a patient is enrolled in, s/he will still be able to access evidence-based health care anywhere in the country.
For internal interoperability, health facilities should ensure that interoperability is observed in three important areas: syntax, semantics, and workflow. Syntactic interoperability refers to the capability of software systems to process data shared with it, while semantic interoperability refers to the capability of software to understand shared data. Workflow interoperability, on the other hand, involves the streamlining of organizational processes within the health facility.
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).
