Standards development organization Health Level Seven kicks off its three-day conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Some of the leading lights in healthcare informatics will discuss health information technology, interoperability and genomics. Speakers are pushing the idea of sharing information and empowering patients to use their family health history to get healthy and remain that way. Founded in 1987, HL7 works to provide a framework and standards for the exchange, integration, sharing and retrieval of electronic health information. The goal is to support clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services, according to the group's mission. HL7 is composed of about 500 corporate members who represent more than 90% of the information systems vendors serving healthcare, according to its website. The group is pushing to implement semantic interoperability to facilitate innovation in healthcare. Among the speakers during the conference are physician informaticist Dr. John Mattison, assistant medical director and chief medical information officer at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. He's the keynote speaker on genomic sequencing. He's followed by Joy Pritts, former chief privacy officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. She's now a privacy and security consultant, who will speak on a panel regarding the role of consumer-oriented genetics in precision medicine. Dr. Stan Huff, chief medical informatics officer of Intermountain Healthcare, will speak Tuesday on advancing genomics through standards and technology. Huff has been involved in promoting the Suitable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies, or SMART platform, combined with HL7's Fast Health Interoperability Resources, or FHIR, pronounced “fire,” known together as SMART on FHIR. The goal of the projects is to use common application programming interfaces, or APIs, to help EHR systems achieve interoperability among providers and developers of mobile device applications.
Health Level Seven (HL7), a health IT holding a three-day conference in D.C., Washington on Monday 27th July. Topics that will be discussed include health information technology, interoperability and genomics.