How to start an interoperability lab.pptx
@Philip Christian Zuniga
A health interoperability laboratory is a facility focusing on the interoperability of digital health applications.
It is a collaborative space equipped with experts digital health experts to design, develop, and test healthcare systems and applications that are standards-based and interoperable.
The resources, processes, and technology needed to manage the lab on a daily basis would depend on the organization’s purpose for setting-up the lab.
A health interoperability lab supports the achievement and measurement of universal health coverage (UHC) through the use of information and communications technology (ICT).
Making healthcare systems standards-based and interoperable is critical in integrating data and information at the level of the patient, the health facility, and the whole health sector.
SIL-Asia believes that this will pave way for evidence-based decision making and thus, grounded health interventions that will contribute to good health and well-being of the patients.
The Regional Interoperability Workshop, organized by the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) at the sidelines of the Global Health Research Forum in August 2015, gave birth to the concept of SIL-Asia as a regional health interoperability lab. The concept of the lab emerged from the need of countries in Asia to have a facility that can benchmark various emerging digital health technologies in the market against a common set of international standards and thus, enable interoperability.
As a result, the regional lab served as a template of in-country labs in Asia that will later form into the Community of Interoperable Labs (COIL). COIL is a group of countries (Viet Nam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Myanmar, Mongolia, Taiwan, and the Philippines) who have pledged during the 6th AeHIN General Meeting and Conference on Interoperability for UHC last 7-9 October 2018 in Colombo, Sri Lanka to co-create their own in-country interoperable labs with SIL-Asia.
SIL-Asia is a regional health interoperability lab that provides technical and capacity-building support to countries in making their healthcare systems and applications interoperable through international standards.
The lab provides a collaborative environment for countries to design, develop, and test healthcare systems and applications that are standards-based and interoperable. With a dedicated team of interoperability collaborators and an advanced pool of technologies, SIL-Asia aims to cover different process chains in the healthcare sector to promote continuity of care.
SIL-Asia enables a space for both the public and private sectors to reproduce healthcare systems and applications. This serves as the groundwork for countries to evaluate the quality of data exchange and interaction among systems and applications before placing them in real-life settings.