37. The Power of HL7 FHIR with Smile Digital Health

In this episode of the InteropNow podcast, Sandy Vance interviews Bo Dagnall, the Chief Product Officer of Smile Digital Health. They discuss Bo's background and history with Smile, his involvement in the FHIR® standards community, and the power of FHIR in healthcare. They also explore the concept of interoperability as a continuum and the role of Smile's product in advancing healthcare. Bo shares success stories and highlights the value of Smile's product in improving patient care. They also discuss data cleanup and the use of AI in healthcare, addressing the risks and responsible use of AI.  “FHIR is a powerful standard that combines the ease and simplicity of HL7 v2 with the semantic integrity of HL7 v3, making it easy to use for implementers and highly adoptable.” Bo Dagnall Interoperability is not a binary problem but a continuum that includes different degrees of interoperability, from common syntax to semantic interoperability and process level interoperability. Smile's clinical data repository plays a crucial role in advancing healthcare by providing a platform for managing and storing data in the FHIR format, standardizing data contents, and enabling clinical reasoning and knowledge interoperability. Smile has partnered with clinical quality experts and is working on BPM+ for Health, which uses BPMN, DMN, and CMMN to describe clinical workflows and enable evidence-based care pathways. Smile is focused on data cleanup and plans to develop tools for automating data ingestion, semantic uplift, and data validation using AI. They aim to achieve explainable AI and ensure human oversight in AI-based recommendations. The future of interoperability is exciting, with the potential to drive knowledge and insights from data, and to bring learning health systems and evidence-based systems to the forefront of healthcare.