As Stranger Things has shown us, a lot has changed since the 80s, includ­ing the way health­care sys­tems share information.

But HL7 v2, the incum­bent tech­nol­o­gy of that time is still hang­ing around like a guest who’s over­stayed their wel­come, imped­ing our tran­si­tion to new Fast Health Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Resources or FHIR (pro­nounced fire).

Our DevOps Team couldn’t wait any longer. They took mat­ters into their own hands and devel­oped the Health Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Toolk­it (HIT).

It tol­er­ates HL7 v2’s lim­i­ta­tions while let­ting us forge ahead with con­tem­po­rary, statewide dig­i­tal ser­vices and sys­tems for the next 20 years as we tran­si­tion to FHIR.

HIT allows patient infor­ma­tion to be secure­ly shared at a scale and effi­ca­cy not seen any­where in Aus­tralia, and pos­si­bly the world. It’s crit­i­cal for our statewide ser­vices which draw on exper­tise from across all sites.
It’s cost effec­tive, with no need for expen­sive third-par­ty soft­ware licens­ing and uses eco­nom­i­cal portable cloud technologies.

HIT enabled pooled COVID-19 PCR test­ing which saw an unimag­in­able vol­ume of tests processed dur­ing the Delta and Omi­cron outbreaks.

It under­pins many of our statewide sys­tems and strate­gies: Path­Works mobile appli­ca­tion; send-away test automa­tion; and our statewide genomics sequenc­ing service.

We can be proud of HIT as an inno­va­tion that’s owned by us, will help our NSW Health col­leagues and invite all man­ner of future collaborations.