First time post for me, and following on from the HiNZ event held in November, Te Whatu Ora and HL7 New Zealand are continuing to conduct a survey to add to our understanding of FHIR capability. The survey helps us understand the FHIR training programmes and resources needed to meet the health sector’s needs. Here is the link:
As you all are likely aware, FHIR is a health interoperability standard for digital interfaces that supports easy and meaningful exchange of health data. Hira will enable health information to be securely accessed through FHIR APIs, so using and understanding FHIR is essential for digital health industry partners interacting with Hira.
The results of the surveys will be compiled and used to deliver a training plan that is fed from the survey responses, and allow us to target key areas of focus or address identified gaps of what and how we can provide FHIR training. They will be summarised and presented here in the Forum.
We’ve had some good responses so far, but really need the perspectives of providers and or consumers of healthcare data. If you use or plan to use FHIR functionality, we would be very grateful if you would complete the survey. It takes about five minutes and will genuinely help us increase the understanding of FHIR capability in New Zealand.
Thanks Rachael - we are planning to wrap up this survey by 26th January, which will allow us to produce the needs assessment with the information collected.
As an FYI, we’ve had a good response to date, so if anyone else wants to contribute, please do respond.
We have had the survey responses back; we had a great result with a total of 110 responses and a lot of detail in the commentary. Thank you so much for your responses, its clear from the commentary that people are invested in this and want support making FHIR a true success for New Zealand.
There is also a clear desire to get FHIR training.
From here, we will review all the responses in a lot more detail and see what commonalities exist to formulate a training plan and provision of training material, and what possible next steps could be to support the wider sector to uplift FHIR maturity for development and consumption.
Here is an initial overview of the results:
Of the 110 respondents who answered, we had good responses from a broad range for organisation size:
Less than 10 employees - 10
10-49 employees - 15
50-249 employees - 20
250+ employees - 57
Of the 108 respondents who answered what their role level was, again we had good responses from a broad range:
Senior Executive / Owner - 20
Team Lead - 19
Department-level Manager - 21
Individual Contributor - 20
Health Practitioner – 10
Others role types included Advisors, Application specialists, Operations Manager, Business Analysts etc
Of the 83 respondents who answered if they used FHIR products already:
Yes – 61 (of which 17 Consuming FHIR services and 44 Providing FHIR services)
No – 22
Of the 84 respondents who answered if they will be consuming or developing FHIR services in the next 18 months:
Yes – 69
No – 6
Unsure – 9
Of the 82 respondents who answered if they are experienced in FHIR development, with a minor shift toward lower maturity to producing FHIR conformance artifacts and IGs (x):
No Experience – 14 (26)
Beginner – 21 (21)
Some Experience – 25 (20)
Significant Experience – 18 (11)
Expert – 4 (3)
Of the 74 respondents who answered if they think FHIR training should be customised to address New Zealand-specific use cases and healthcare needs (with a lot of further supporting responses to this question):
Not at all important – 2
Slightly Important – 8
Moderately Important – 14
Very Important – 37
Extremely Important – 13
We will commence the detailed analysis for the full responses as it leads into what we think sector training needs may look like – more information on this will be coming soon.
