It’s All About Bringing Data to the Next Level

Author:  Clement Ng

As pressure on health systems around the world increases due to longer life expectancies and chronic diseases, people are searching for solutions to manage their health in the (near) future. Connected care will be key, to exchange adequate patient information between different healthcare providers, in order to deliver better outcomes for patients. 

Fortunately, there are already multitudes of technical options available today that have been implemented across the healthcare industry for information exchange, such as IHE-XDS for cross-enterprise document sharing within different healthcare networks. XDS offers a solid infrastructure solution for sharing all types of medical content — letters, images, lab results and so on—but always in a document format. 

Unfortunately, from a connected care perspective, applications, PHRs, AI and BI services need more specific and detailed information for optimal decision support to facilitate the collaborative care process. Having the right – specific – information, at the right time in the right place is critical in order to deliver better care.

Just having basic medical information available isn’t good enough anymore for healthcare information exchange. That’s where FHIR steps in to take exchanging health data to the next level, and why Smile Digital Health has teamed up with Enovation to implement Smile in the Netherlands, Belgium and UK, with additional locations to come. With over 35 years of experience in secure digital exchange of medical data between 18,000 healthcare organizations, Enovation is the premier healthcare information exchange specialist, focused only on healthcare and health data interoperability deeply embedded in its DNA. 

Enovation will—via the Enovation platform—bring Smile to a very dynamic market that has been a strong proponent of and that is increasingly specifying FHIR as a national requirement for health data interoperability.

“We have been undertaking an extensive and detailed evaluation of FHIR servers to underpin our Enovation platform,” says Ron Meijsen, Manager integration services at Enovation, “and Smile CDR is our product of choice. Flexible and highly configurable tooling for implementing systems in a secure and scalable manner was a key requirement for our technology stack – and Smile CDR was an obvious choice.”

“Smile CDR's commercialization began with our first customer in the Netherlands. This is a great market to innovate and deliver on the promise of FHIR,” says Clement Ng, VP of Sales and Marketing at Smile CDR. “We are very honoured to be working with such an experienced partner as Enovation who are intimately familiar with the challenges of health data connectivity, and who will be able to provide use cases to help drive our product roadmap, while pushing us to keep innovating.”

Creating truly connected and interoperable healthcare systems is a global problem, so it only makes sense to work with partners across borders to find solutions. 

Stay tuned for more use cases as we roll out projects together with Enovation!