It's been too long since I've written an HL7 Plenary Wednesday post, but if you understand the history of this blog, you know what is coming. For rather understandable reasons, I have shifted a great deal of my focus towards implementations and standards supporting Public Health, rather than the EHR space. Some of that has to do with what my employer Audacious Inquiry does, but other parts of that stem from seeing an unmet need that can impact people around my country, and even more so, the public health people working very hard, and on very limited budgets to keep us all healthy. That unmet need became even more apparent as we went through COVID-19 and are still in many ways recovering from it.
Significant effort is underway even now to connect public health to the health information eco-system that we in HL7, IHE and other organizations have been creating for patients. One of those efforts is to enable public health agencies to connect to that eco-system through TEFCA and national networks to make it easier, cheaper and faster to do the jobs that need to be done, and to improve the infrastructure that is long overdue for a major upgrade.
Over the last couple of years, I met a young leader whose team is developing tools to enable public health agencies connect to the Health Information Superhighway we have been trying to create for the past two decades. Over the past year, I worked closely with him and his team at two different FHIR Connectathon events to better enable agencies to build on-ramps to that expressway. Through his work, I've been able to make some on-ramps of my own that should enable public health agencies better access to their own data using a more modern infrastructure and achieve a five-year goal I set for myself back in early 2021.
This next recipient is someone I've not had a chance to watch over a long period of time, nor see him grow (though I know he has even in the short time I've known him). He does what all good leaders do, which is to enable others to succeed, and by others, in this case, I mean me. We have infrequent contact, we don't really work on the same project, but where our roles intercept, he's made it possible for me achieve a significant goal. Without further ado, here's the next Ad Hoc Harley.
For Daniel Paseltiner, of Skylight
P.S. I know this post was more about me than Dan, and for that, I'm sorry. I do wish Dan and I had more opportunities to work more closely together on a project. To see some of the work of Dan and his team, check out the DIBBS Query Connector project on GitHub.
