2023 Annual Report
The launch of the HL7 3-Year Plan in 2022 marked a pivotal moment for our organization and community. Throughout 2023, as we worked towards the plan’s 10 key strategies, we witnessed remarkable advances in the interlinked activities of standards development and implementation. Our community’s vibrancy drives this progress, and this theme resonates throughout my reflections.
As we push ourselves to keep adapting and addressing the next epoch of global interoperability challenges, we do so amidst a rapidly transforming landscape. In our complex adaptive healthcare system, HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®)-enabled transformations constantly mix with other changing forces like regulatory and business drivers. And no doubt, the spread of ubiquitous, powerful artificial intelligence (AI) will radically change healthcare and accelerate our learning cycles. I want to underscore though that HL7's progress, especially with FHIR, has always been driven by the power of community, peer-production, and the commitment to working openly. With a growing implementation base and AI at our side, we expect to build more and faster feedback loops throughout our work. Always learning, always sharing, and always improving.
Your participation in HL7 brings a unique perspective, and we are grateful for how you choose to contribute these gifts to the public good. Here, you’re part of an unparalleled global brain trust that is catalyzing innovation across the industry. 2023 was full of examples of how your work is driving digital transformation around the world. From the adoption of FHIR in many new national regulations to HL7 and the World Health Organization (WHO) forming a landmark collaboration, we see the specifications developed at HL7 becoming the foundation for person-centered digital solutions around the world. In the Fall, the Digital Square organization recognized FHIR as a bona fide Global Good—a resource helping shape the future of health data for digital transformation. We continue building connections to other Global Good communities of practice, including a new collaboration agreement with Open Concept Lab that is advancing semantic interoperability using FHIR-based terminology approaches. In fact, 30 of the 36 Global Goods recognized by Digital Square use HL7 FHIR, so we're in good company.
In HL7's 3-Year Plan, we made a conscious commitment to cultivating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where everyone can experience the deep satisfaction of contributing their unique perspective towards the common goal of interoperability.
To better understand where we stand and help plot the course towards what we want to become, we surveyed work group co-chairs and management group members. We also made the significant step of hiring Daniel Bach as our HL7 inaugural Community Manager. What does a Community Manager do, you might ask? Well, in this role, Daniel is focused on helping us intentionally cultivate a vibrant, healthy community ethos. He is using program management approaches to develop and execute on the contributor engagement plan, curate a community health dashboard, and create a community roadmap.
Some of the initial focus areas of our community roadmap include:
