9. Healthcare Interoperability: Part 2 (Russ Leftwich‪)‬ Data Points

This episode features the second part of our interview with senior clinical advisor for interoperability at InterSystems, Russ Leftwich. Check out Episode 8 for the first half! In this portion of the interview, Adam and Russ carry the healthcare interoperability discussion into more specifics about InterSystems technologies and FHIR applications.
After the interview, we're also welcoming Jenny Ames back to the podcast to tell us about the upcoming FHIR Dev Days! Check out https://gettingstartedhealth.intersystems.com and https://www.devdays.com/us/event-info/ for more details.
For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com
 
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 
Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast. App. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson.
 
Adam Coppola 00:00:16 And I'm Adam Coppola.
 
Derek Robinson 00:00:18 And today we feature part two of our interview with Russ Leftwich, Senior Clinical Advisor for Interoperability here at InterSystems.
 
Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode Nine of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. We're going to go straight into part two of our interview with Russ Leftwich. This half of the interview features just Adam and Russ. To listen to the first half of the interview, you can check out the most recent episode before this one, Episode Eight. After part two of the interview, we'll come back and chat with Adam about some of the key takeaways as well as welcome Jenny Ames back to the podcast to discuss the upcoming FHIR Dev Days. Without further ado, part two with Russ Leftwich.
 
Adam Coppola 00:01:14 So as of 2020, InterSystems products support FHIR®. So that's InterSystems IRIS for Health™, which is meant to be a platform for app development, and HealthShare®, which is meant to be an interoperability engine for healthcare facilities. Can you talk to us a little bit about what some of the applications using FHIR might look like?
 
Russ Leftwich 00:01:35 So one of the principle advantages of FHIR is that you can access just small data sets, small pieces of data, because most of the time in healthcare, that's all you really need for the care of a patient or for that matter, that's all a patient needs at any one time is just what medicines are being prescribed right now. What are the lab results, the cholesterol levels for the past year? You don't want to know everything about a patient very often. You just want to know some particular piece of data, and that's what FHIR is particularly useful for, because of this idea of resources that are logical, but discreet data concepts. So a medication or a patient or a lab observation, those you can express in FHIR, and you can query for just those pieces of data with FHIR. That makes the possibility of having applications, and particularly mobile portable applications, a whole new paradigm with FHIR that wasn't possible, previously — wasn't possible 10 years ago, because you can just create an application around the small set of data that is of interest in a particular use case, either to a clinician, to a patient, or to somebody doing research even. Our technology in InterSystems goes a large step further by including the ability to transform data that's in existing legacy standards into FHIR resources. So we can take in data fr