MANDALUYONG, Philippines – The Standards and Interoperability Lab-Asia (SIL-Asia) organized and hosted, with support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a capacity-building workshop for the establishment of the Viet Nam Interoperability Lab on 13-15 June 2018. Seven representatives from the Electronic Health Administration (EHA), Ministry of Health Viet Nam participated in the capacity-building workshop.

To provide context on the proposed in-country interoperability lab, EHA presented the eHealth status in Viet Nam. Building on the previous talks on eHealth where ADB, SIL-Asia, and the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) were involved, the participants engaged in an extensive discussion on health enterprise architecture.

James Agnew, Lead Architect with the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation (UHN) in Toronto Canada, and a member of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) Core Team, also shared his expert insights on conceptualizing interoperability architecture options that are tailor-fit to EHA’s goals and requirements.

SIL-Asia facilitated a series of sessions to help the team develop a lab strategy plan and to discuss testing and certification processes. The workshop provided the avenue for EHA to articulate their long-term goals for the in-country interoperability lab.

The workshop also included a site- visit to the National Telehealth Center (NTHC) to demonstrate how two technologies can be integrated using FHIR. Specifically, the NTHC team discussed how the FHIR Implementation Guide was used to integrate two of its homegrown technologies: (1) Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS); (2) and RxBox, a biomedical device.

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