VIRTUAL – The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia) shared its experiences in establishing a reference interoperability lab in the Asia Pacific Region at the ‘Regional and Cross Health Systems Partnerships and Collaboration‘ panel of the Global Digital Health Forum 2020 (GDHF 2020) on December 8, 2020. This panel session was part of the Strategic Planning, Financing, and Capacity Building for Digital Health and Health System track of the virtual conference. It shared the experiences from networks and partnership models in Central America, the Asia Pacific, and within remote regions of Australia that enable greater and faster digital transformation.
In this session, SIL-Asia Technical Director, Philip Christian Zuniga represented the Asia Pacific region and discussed the various knowledge materials that the lab has developed over the past years. The presentation summarized how an interoperability lab set-up can be replicated in the participants’ respective countries or health facilities in the pursuit of universal health coverage (UHC). As a reference regional health interoperability lab, SIL-Asia provides a template for the formation of national health interoperability labs, which can then support the adoption of standards. Conformance to standards will allow health information systems to easily exchange data for high-quality and evidence-based health services.
Hosted by the Global Digital Health Network, the Global Digital Health Forum is an annual digital health gathering that brings together the digital health leaders from across the world to reflect on and shape the future of the community. Previous GDHFs have been held in Washington, D.C. The GDHF 2020 proved to be an important forum this year due to the accelerated use of digital health tools amid the pandemic. This year’s theme is ‘Digital Health – Making it Work for Everyone.’
To learn more about HL7-FHIR initiatives in Asia Pacific, visit this blog on the ‘Growth of Interoperability Labs in the Asia Pacific Region.’
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).
