METRO MANILA, Philippines – The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia) trained four graduate interns from the Department of Information Management, National Taipei University of Nursing and Health Sciences (NTUNHS) from 15 July to 15 August 2019. The one-month internship is part of the international knowledge exchange program between the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) and Taiwan Electronic Health Association (TEHA).
Co-creating Smart Healthcare Center of Excellence in Taiwan
For the first week of the program, the interns participated in a lab planning workshop at the Asian Development Bank. The training guided the interns on how to build a health interoperability lab through SIL-Asia’s co-creation process. This included situational analysis, goal-setting, stakeholder identification, and resource planning for the lab they are trying to organize in Taiwan, namely the ‘Smart Healthcare Center of Excellence in Taiwan.’
Interns from NTUNHS participate in SIL-Asia’s summer internship program for the Smart Healthcare Center of Excellence in Taiwan
Their lab envisions the promotion of person-centered care with precision health interoperability. With this, SIL-Asia helped the interns come up with plans for their lab’s communications strategy, sustainability mechanisms, and progress indicators.
Integrating Personal Health Record and HL7-FHIR
The remaining weeks focused on the implementation of HL7-FHIR (Health Level Seven International – Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources). SIL-Asia honed the technical capabilities of the interns at the Department of Computer Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. HL7-FHIR is the emerging standard in health data exchange and sharing; it uses the power of the web to exchange data across disparate platforms and technologies.
Ada Cariaga, one of SIL-Asia’s interoperability experts, orients the interns on HL7-FHIR
As a major output, the interns have developed a translator from their own My Health Bank system to HL7-FHIR. This is one of the first implementations of a personal health record to HL7-FHIR. My Health Bank is an online service in Taiwan. It allows people with National Health Insurance (NHI) to view their own medical history.
NTUNHS interns who joined the SIL-Asia’s summer internship program are Hsian Hsuan Chen, Yin Chen Chen, Ya Fang Cheng, and Hsin Hsua Kung under the guidance of Prof. Chien Yeh Hsu and Hsiu An Lee.
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 Regional Interoperability Workshop organized by AeHIN at the sidelines of the Global Health Research Forum last August 2015 gave birth to the concept of Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia. The regional lab aims to serve as a template of labs in each country that will later form into the Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL).
