By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

A few weeks ago, WTF Health took the show on the road to Australia’s digital health conference, HIC 2019. We captured more than 30 interviews (!) from the conference, which is run by the Health Informatics Society of Australia (hence the HISA Studio branding) and I had the opportunity to chat with most of the Australian Digital Health Agency’s leadership, many administrators from the country’s largest health systems, and a number of health informaticians, clinicians, and patients. I’ll be spotlighting a few of my favorites here in a four-part series to give you a flavor of what’s happening in health innovation ‘Down Under.’ For much more, check out all the videos on the playlist here.  

I’d like to kick off the series with my interview on all things interoperability with arguably the most famous Australian in health tech, Grahame Grieve. 

Grahame Grieve, “the Father of FHIR” architected healthcare’s best shot at EMR data interoperability when he founded HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), but have you heard what prompted Grahame to pursue creating a common standard for electronic health data exchange in the first place? Grahame shares the surprisingly personal and emotional story and weighs in how he thinks FHIR adoption is going so far. If your business has anything to do with health IT, EMR, or healthcare’s play in big data, be sure to tune in to find out what’s next for FHIR, whether or not Big Tech’s new role in healthcare can help speed up adoption, and if Grahame thinks we’ll ever finally solve healthcare’s interoperability problem.

Filmed in the HISA Studio at HIC 2019 in Melbourne, Australia, August 2019.