AMIA and HL7 Announce Healthcare Interoperability Partnership

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and Health Level Seven International (HL7) announced a two-year partnership that aims to enhance interoperability across the healthcare continuum.

With over 5,000 members, AMIA is the leading professional organization for informatics professionals. The organization’s mission is to advance informatics and assure that stakeholders use health IT effectively to promote health and health care.

The goal of HL7 is to provide freely available data standards for interoperability that improve care delivery, optimize clinical workflows, and enhance data sharing across the care continuum.

“AMIA and HL7 have a long history of collaborating together,” Gretchen Purcell Jackson, MD, PhD, FACS, FACMI, FAMIA, AMIA board chair and president, noted in a press release.

“As an organization of members who created and implemented technologies for the electronic health record, our partnership with HL7 is essential in moving forward with advancing health and healthcare with standards for interoperability,” said Purcell Jackson, who also serves as vice president and scientific medical officer of Intuitive Surgical.

AMIA and HL7 have collaborated in the past, most notably with the FHIR Application Competition held at the AMIA Annual Symposium the last four years.

The sponsored competition allows participants to showcase their app at a session during the largest informatics meeting worldwide. The competition includes approximately 10 applications with a panel of judges and voting by the audience.

The 2021 AMIA/HL7 FHIR App Competition Winners include:

• First Place: Ken Kawamoto; Disease Manager
• Second Place: Subha Airan-Javia; Bringing FHIR to the Bedside: An EHR Connected Mobile Application to Bring Real-Time Clinical Data Coupled with a User-First Team Collaboration Platform to the Point of Care
• Third Place: Ajay Dharod; Involving Patients Using FHIR

“As a longtime member of AMIA, I see collaboration as essential to advancing interoperability across the stakeholders,” said Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD, HL7 CEO. “HL7 and FHIR have become global resources and working alongside AMIA will bring us closer to our mutual goals of ensuring healthcare and health information technology are efficient and effective.”