Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability Convenes COVID-19 Listening Sessions

The Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability is working collaboratively with other organizations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating the deployment of healthcare standards to quickly and efficiently share critical patient information and to meet pressing interoperability needs for healthcare providers and public health professionals around the globe.

The Consortium is taking a multi-pronged approach by convening listening sessions with key stakeholders. These sessions will help clinicians and public health agencies around the world leverage critical existing resources and respond to this global emergency. Sessions are designed to:

• Ensure a clearer understanding of the unique immediate and longer-term challenges that health systems and clinicians are facing fighting COVID-19.
   
• Inform the development of use cases and associated requirements to drive the build-out of digital resources for front-line clinicians and public health agencies to utilize in their efforts to combat this virus and possibly forestall future pandemics.
   
• Convene digital health experts to advise on best practices for applying existing HL7 specifications and IHE profiles within health information systems to support clinicians and public health organizations in responding to this pandemic.
   
• Focus on gathering real-world input that, together with more formal testing, can lead to improved standards-based solutions that can be more rapidly deployed in the future to reduce the impact of future health crises.

The Consortium is curating the following series of three initial COVID-19 listening sessions to help raise awareness, reduce duplicative efforts, focus industry resources, and share actionable insights from key stakeholders involved in the global pandemic response.

• Session 1 Focus – Clinical Care: Clinicians and Provider Organizations on the Frontline of COVID-19: Data exchange needs and pain points, Wednesday, April 29, at 1 p.m. CT.
  Register Here.
   
• Session 2 Focus - Technology: HIT Professionals and Market Suppliers – Accelerating Interoperability by Leveraging Existing Resources, Wednesday, May 27, at 2 p.m. CT.
  Register Here.
   
• Session 3 Focus – Policy: How Governments and Ministries of Health are Working with the Industry to Respond to COVID, Wednesday, June 24 at 2 p.m. CT. 
  Register Here.

Each 90-minute listening session will include representatives from key projects that will provide an overview of their efforts, projected milestones and describe potential opportunities for participation. These listening sessions will be held at different times to accommodate an international audience. Listening sessions will be facilitated by Consortium subject matter experts. A summary brief will be generated after each session, and a final report will be published to the Consortium website globalhealthinterop.org once the first series of listening sessions have concluded.

The Consortium aims to support standards development, adoption, interpretation and acceleration in alignment with key policy principles endorsed by Ministries of Health and government agencies around the globe, with the goal of advancing the deployment of interoperable health solutions that improve patient health outcomes.

HIMSS, HL7 International and IHE International formed the Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability to help the global community deploy key initiatives by aligning technology and policy resources to improve outcomes. Learn more about the Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability.