Join us at FHIR North

The Smile CDR team is proud to again be supporting FHIR North as an event partner. FHIR® North the only Canadian conference dedicated to HL7®  Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). And this year it’s virtual!

HL7 FHIR is an open source messaging standard and data model for healthcare information exchange. Simply put, FHIR is the leading global healthcare data exchange standard of the future. 

The theme this year is FHIR Without Borders: Accelerating Change During a Global Pandemic. The events of 2020 have served as a potent reminder that public health crises like pandemics don’t respect national borders, and as such the work needed to combat them shouldn’t either. Fortunately, this is something the open source community in general and the FHIR community in particular have long understood. 

The FHIR standard has already gained traction with governments, healthcare organizations of every size, technology vendors, educational institutions and so many other stakeholders. As the FHIR community expands, so does the capacity to produce and deploy innovative solutions and tooling built around this next generation open standard.  

Complemented by other tools and technologies, like SMART on FHIR and SNOMED CT, and refined by the development of implementation guides, it’s becoming more feasible to create applications, infrastructure and processes that really can interoperate across borders. 

Why FHIR North Should be on Your Agenda

While we can’t meet in person, a virtual FHIR North provides the opportunity for attendees and speakers from across Canada and around the world to share knowledge and make connections. 

FHIR North is more than just a developer’s conference: our sessions help build understanding and knowledge for anyone who wants to learn how this standard improves patient care and the clinical experience.

Through our keynote and plenary sessions, business-focused FHIR academy sessions and tech-focused code camp, we’ll explore how FHIR and interoperability can play a role in the response to a global pandemic and what that means for the future of healthcare innovation.

FHIR North is also accredited by Digital Health Canada as a Continuing Education Provider. By attending FHIR North, you can earn up to 10 Continuous Education (CE) Credits for your CPHIMS-CA certification.

Plenary Sessions

A great place to start exploring FHIR North and get a big picture view is with our plenary sessions. Didi Davis, VP Informatics, Conformance and Interoperability at the Sequoia Project will give the opening keynote, “Advancing Interoperability for the Public Good”. Her talk will explore how the Sequoia Project is collaborating with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the US to lead the development of a framework to ease the transition from legacy technologies to next generation standards like FHIR. 

Bryn Rhodes, Alphora CTO and Natschja Ratanaprayul, Technical Officer at the World Health Organization, are presenting a plenary talk on  “Leveraging HL7 FHIR for Smart Guidelines: Advancing Use of WHO Guidelines in the Digital Age”. Natschja and Bryn will delve into how the WHO is leveraging FHIR to WHO to better support member states by publishing guidelines in a more digitally friendly format. 

The Day 2 Welcome will feature Smile CDR’s very own co-founder and CTO, James Agnew. The morning Plenary,  “Automatable Clinical Guidelines Using Open Standards” will see Denis Gagne, CEO of Trisotech (Smile CDR partner), speaking about the BPM+ Health Community, Integrating HL7 FHIR and CDS Hooks to improve patient care and the clinical experience, and a live demo featuring a real-life example of integrating FHIR data. 

Another Day 2 plenary session, “Fresenius Medical Care’s FHIR First Strategy” will feature Radu Craioveanu, VP Software Development & Clinical Systems at Fresenius and Irnya Roy, Enterprise Architect at Gevity Consulting Inc, who will take a look at how the leading dialysis and renal care provider (also a Smile CDR partner) is leveraging FHIR as a canonical data model to drive data access, patient management, IoT and streaming data collection across the enterprise. 

You’ll want to stick around until the very end because our Closing Keynote, “FHIR – Past, Present, and Future” features Grahame Grieve, HL7 Product Director for FHIR and Principal at Health Intersections Pty Ltd. Grahame is widely acknowledged as the “father” of FHIR and has worked on FHIR implementations around the world since the birth of the standard, so you won’t want to miss what he has to say about where FHIR has come from, lessons learned along the way, and what the future holds for FHIR. 

Public Health, Virtual Care, FHIR as a Data Platform, and Scaling Up

This year’s sessions are organized around four main themes.

Public Health sessions include Derek Ritz, Principal Consultant, at ecGroup Inc. Derek gave an extremely compelling presentation at FHIR North 2019 focused on Computable Care Guidelines (CCG).  He’s returning this year to give updates on the significant progress that’s been made, including a live demonstration of a Lung Cancer Diagnosis CCG prototype developed by Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario), Hamilton Health Sciences, and Canada Health Infoway. 

Virtual Care has taken on renewed importance this year, and FHIR has a key role to play.

Laura Pus of Women’s College Hospital and Sheridan Cook of Gevity Consulting Inc. will provide their perspective on how the use of FHIR in virtual transformation efforts helps shed light on data interoperability challenges felt by hospitals in Canada. Their session, “Women’s College Hospital – FHIR’s Role in Virtual Transformation” will speak to lessons learned from the data discovery efforts that WCH completed as part of the rollout of their Epic FHIR Server and Smart-on-FHIR integration with a market-leading 3rd party patient facing application.

Igor Sirkovich, Consultant and Health IT Interoperability Architect at Xperterra will be presenting “Consumer Access APIs in the US”. Igor will provide an overview of the CMS/ONC Cures Act Rule, which aims to give patients and their healthcare providers secure access to health information via Patient Access API, as well as introducing the CARIN BB (Consumer Directed Payer Data Exchange), Da Vinci Payer Data Exchange and Da Vinci PDEX Plan Net FHIR Implementation Guides. His discussion will be of interest to anyone looking to serve the US payer market, but he’ll also discuss how the US Patient Access FHIR API frameworks can be leveraged in Canada.

FHIR as a Data Platform is our third theme, and one that’s become increasingly relevant as healthcare organizations continue to realize the value of FHIR as more than just a messaging standard, but as a canonical data model and tool for data unification. 

Sessions around this theme include Peter Williams, Technical Specialist with SNOMED CT, presenting a Code Camp session titled “SNOMED CT with FHIR.” SNOMED CT is a widely used healthcare terminology standard, and Peter will provide an introduction to SNOMED and reveal why SNOMED and FHIR together are a powerful combination. 

Scaling Up is a topic that’s top of mind for health informaticians given the sheer volume of health data being generated. That FHIR support is now offered by leading cloud providers shows the growing demand for rapidly scalable FHIR implementations. 

In FHIR Works on AWS, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution Architect Neil McFarlane will discuss Amazon’s new open source software toolkit and how it can be used to add FHIR interface capabilities to existing healthcare software. 

Richward Wang, VP Customer Solutions at iNTERFACEWARE will present “Transforming Legacy Health Data with Azure FHIR”, which will explore how to use a modern integration engine to convert legacy data (ex. HL7 v2) to FHIR resources and automatically deploy the entire solution on Azure within minutes.

Join your Digital Health Colleagues

These are just a taste of what to expect at FHIR North and there are so many more sessions to explore. Please visit the FHIR North website for a complete listing of all our speakers and topics. 

FHIR North is fast approaching, so get your tickets soon. Prices are very affordable, with generous group and student discounts available. 

If you’re facing financial difficulties due to COVID-19, a limited number of partial bursaries are also available. 

Head over to the FHIR North official website to secure your spot today! 

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7.