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By Rupert Lee, Enterprise Solutions & Growth General Manager at Telstra Health
Telstra Health unveiled Australia’s first FHIR-native data platform in February this year in an exclusive partnership with Smile Digital Health that is set to change the healthcare connectivity landscape across Australia and New Zealand.
Telstra Health’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) solutions, powered by Smile Digital Health’s HL7® FHIR® first Health Data Platform, offers an open, cohesive and vendor-neutral environment to streamline communication and interoperability between healthcare organisations and citizens.
Heeding the call for FHIR based interfaces
The launch of Telstra Health’s HIE coincided with the release of the Australian Digital Health Agency’s (ADHA) National Healthcare Interoperability Plan 2023-2028, a five-year roadmap outlining how the Australian Government plans to facilitate information sharing across the health system in a more seamless, user friendly and accessible way.
To achieve the vision of a connected digital health ecosystem, the ADHA recommends taking a health information exchange-based approach to the national digital health infrastructure. This involves plans to move My Health Record to a modern FHIR-enabled personal health record system.
According to the Plan, outdated technical specifications and standards cannot support real-time data sharing, which is why the ADHA recommends using FHIR-based interfaces to build an architecture and framework that is fit for this purpose.
FHIR for interoperability
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an open-source standard for healthcare data exchange. FHIR is helping to modernise the healthcare sector and solve the connected health care challenge by facilitating the seamless exchange of data between disparate health systems, enabling providers to share patient information easily.
Openness and interoperability are crucial to enabling better patient care, driving efficiencies and minimising errors across the healthcare system. Real time exchange of data also opens opportunities to extract insights, providing researchers and public health authorities with a big picture view of population health.
Telstra Health takes a data-driven approach to information sharing across its portfolio of solutions, software and services, and FHIR is central to this methodology. As an early FHIR adopter, we began using this contemporary standard for digital healthcare information exchange in our products in 2016 and more recently with our Virtual Health Platform, Australia’s first FHIR-native virtual care platform.
Smile’s HL7® FHIR® first Health Data Platform solution and integration platform is the latest FHIR-based offering to join our tech stack.
A partnership to Smile about
An award-winning health data platform company based out of Canada; Smile Digital Health is pioneering the intelligent use of health information with its Health Data Platform. Built entirely on FHIR-native technology, the platform is recognised globally as a best-in-class solution for healthcare data harmonisation, integration and information sharing.
Smile’s interoperable health data exchange architecture provides a centralised database for storing and managing electronic health information and clinical data from various sources within or external to a healthcare organisation. Using the one solution, providers can ingest, transform, store, enrich, analyse, aggregate and share information to provide a complete picture of a patient’s health and care journey.
Smile stands out from other clinical reasoning solutions because of its FHIR and Clinical Quality language-based technology, supporting seamless data aggregation, care gap analysis and clinical data analytics at multiple points of care, which can be reflected in electronic health records (EHRs) across the ecosystem.
As a scalable FHIR-native Health Data Platform, the technology is compatible with all HL7 FHIR resources, including Australian healthcare standards such as AU Core and AU eRequesting. It also supports the mandatory sharing of key health information across care settings, offering public and private sector organisations a viable pathway towards a more integrated and interoperable health system.
Telstra Health and our customers will be able to build upon Smile’s platform with additional components to further drive healthcare modernisation regionally and on a broader scale.
A platform backed by experience
Smile has a proven track record of breaking down the barriers posed by legacy solutions to facilitate the secure exchange of information in healthcare settings around the world. It supports many large public and private sector organisations including federal agencies, universities, government bodies and leading corporations.
Among the organisations that use Smile to deliver new service offerings and models of care, improve patient outcomes and increase organisational efficiency is The Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services HIE, which serves a patient population of more than 13 million people.
The World Health Organisation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also rely on the platform to meet FHIR and clinical reasoning requirements, while The Yale Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation, Security Risk Solutions and the Association of Public Health Laboratories incorporate the technology into their work.
Powering the future of connected healthcare
By pairing Smile’s best in class health data exchange architecture with Telstra Health’s solutions, services and healthcare data endpoints that span the entire health and aged care spectrum, this partnership offers new possibilities for healthcare providers to achieve interoperability.
Telstra Health and Smile are committed to delivering better health in Australia and New Zealand through open standards to realise a connected and improved digital health experience for everyone.
There has never been a better time to make real-time information sharing a reality with Telstra Health. Find out how our Health Information Exchange solution improves continuity of care and the patient experience.
