ADHA, HL7 Australia prep healthcare software developer training

The Australian Digital Health Agency and HL7 Australia will kick off a training program in May that is designed to address a looming skills shortage in the healthcare software sector.

While the advent of digital health has already seen an explosion in available software, ADHA’s chief digital officer Peter O’Halloran said interoperability remains the sector’s greatest challenge, and finding developers (along with other stakeholders up to executives) familiar with the standards needed to solve that problem is holding the sector back.

So the ADHA and HL7 Australia (the Australian affiliate of healthcare interop body HL7 International) have teamed up with CSIRO and the University of Melbourne to create training specific to the new Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resource (FHIR) standard.

The partners expect to offer 370 developer training places in calendar 2023, with expressions of interest now open at HL7 Australia’s website.

The aim, O’Halloran told iTnews, is to break down the enduring silos in healthcare IT: systems in general practice, in private specialists, in hospitals and in allied healthcare “operate in different ways to different standards," he said.

As a result, "the healthcare system is the biggest purchaser of fax machines globally.
“That needs to stop.”

HL7 Australia chair Isobel Frean told iTnews that “the fundamental issue is we don’t have enough people skilled to use that standard."

“We want to build that community of expertise through our memorandum of understanding with the ADHA," Frean said.

HL7 International has deployed standards for more than 30 years, with HL7v2 the most used at the moment.

In creating FHIR, Frean said, the standards body decided on broad adoption of familiar Internet standards like JSON, various internet protocols and security protocols, XML, RESTful APIs and so on.

O’Halloran said the aim is to use “industry standard concepts and putting a healthcare spin on them for the bits that need to be different."

"It doesn’t require developers to re-learn everything," O'Halloran said.

“People who might have been a software developer for an app on a smartphone, can now connect their app to clinical systems.”

O’Halloran added that as well as the interoperability standards, the training will help developers understand along with regulations and data requirements.

The training will show “how to do the integrations, but also the business workflow of the clinical environment, because this gives them a sandpit where they can do all that”.

If the training achieves its intended reach, O’Halloran said, it will address ‘a quite dramatic shortage, with tangible outcomes you’ll see this year.”