Indian Covid-19 Telehealth Application (based on #FHIR)
Jul 29, 2020A couple of weekends ago, HL7 India held the inaugural FHIR Connectathon for India. I was honoured to be ask to attend, and so I joined the main zoom channel several times. (Zooming into India is a poor substitute for actually meeting the people and getting good curry breakfast, lunch and dinner, but we make do with what we have).
The whole connectathon was very well organised - in fact, astoundingly so for a first time; kudos to the organisers and HL7 India. They might be late to the process, but they look like they’re running hard to catch up and overtake other countries.
India, btw, has a massive base of engineers who understand FHIR, since there’s so much outsourcing to India - India has always loomed large in the geo-resolution of hits on the FHIR test servers. But India hasn’t matched this with all the other parts of the health IT eco-system - business analysts, policy maker interest and experience, and the business eco-system around the engineers. That’s been changing in the last year, with India hosting the GDHP, and releasing a number of policy and architectural strategy documents this year.
One stream really stood out for me, though, both in terms of being appropriately topical, well planned, and with real energy and participation around it. That stream was the telehealth consultation stream.
Briefly, the idea is to provide an eco-system that allows both patients and clinicians to connect by applications, and facilitates remote interaction / examination by doctors. In particular, the immediate use case is around determining whether a Covid-19 test is appropriate.
I suggested the team write up a report of what they did at the connectathon, and here’s the document they wrote for me. Thanks Kumar and team!
p.s. ignore the bits about me.