Healthcare organisations must be able to build and scale their data systems quickly if they need to talk to multiple systems within their hospitals or across other hospitals. 

In a presentation at HIMSS22 APAC, Stella Ramette, Director of Customer Relations and Sales at InterSystems Southeast Asia, shared how their organisation is helping healthcare providers and hospitals harness data to drive insights and foresight using HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), a standard for exchanging healthcare data.

"You need to make sure it's fast and it's easy to learn and [be adopted], and that you can future proof it," she said about building data systems.

It also has to have breaks or granular data, she emphasised. "A lot of the time your data is in transcription notes because you need to make sure that you can get context out of the scanned documents. It's not about digitalisation, it's about data-fication. You need to make sense of the data, so you need to have granular data."

One vendor that can help sort, organise, and integrate data into analytics is InterSystems, she said.

For Ramette, what makes them unique is having a bidirectional approach to harnessing data. Its data platform does not only clean and harmonises data, she said, but it can also send data back to sources. "The ability to give notifications, to send information back to the source system is key. And that's what really makes us unique."

Igniting FHIR

In "igniting" data insights with FHIR, Ramette advised cleaning and curating data first.  Organisations may also co-create with vendors like InterSystems, who also provides workshops on FHIR. 

Being consistent in every little effort done in the process is also key, she noted. 

"You are [already] in the right direction because FHIR is the right format to use to send data and share data. But for this to excel, not only the government needs to be good at doing it. Every single clinic, every single region, and [every] hospital needs to do things the right way so we are meaning the same thing," she said.

"I hope that not only are you going to ignite FHIR [but you're also] going to create beautiful 'fireworks' in the future," Ramette said in closing.