S.W.O.T. Analysis for Public Health Work Group
S.W.O.T. analysis for Public Health Work Group
September 14, 2017
What are the strengths of your workgroup?
- Strong participation from the US federal, and US state governmental agencies, NGO, and consultants
- Ability to work with international SDO (OASIS, IHE) as needed
- Active participation by a select group of members
- Strong domain knowledge
What are the weaknesses of your workgroup?
- Lack of active participation from state and local public health jurisdictions, as well as, EHR vendors.
- Must accommodate all HL7 product lines.
- Lack of in-depth implementation knowledge of FHIR
- Lack of resources to fully participate in relevant activities of other work groups such as vocabulary, CIMI, EHR, FHIR, etc
What opportunities do you see that can be addressed by your workgroup?
- Increased governmental interest in data sharing
- Increased governmental recognition of importance of interoperability standards (e.g. Meaningful Use and MACRA) It is expected that this will continue.
- Opportunity to increase awareness and capability of public health to participate additional means of data exchange
- Increased interaction with clinical care (EMR/EHR/PHR, ONC, eHealth Exchange)
- Integration with emergency preparedness activities
- Understand realm specific capabilities can be generalized for global use.
- More recognition that PH has many trading partners
- Establish PHER as the domain to talk about specific topics, like immunization and lab
- PH provides an opportunity to look at broader HL7 issues due to the large scope of PH concerns.
- The PHER workgroup has the ability to help standardize communications and associated concepts with public health registries and systems across domains.
What obstacles or threats to progress have you identified?
- Time to produce standards does not fit the timeframes of sponsors and regulators which threatens the legitimacy of the standards process and the quality of the products
- Minimal resources in the public health sector to implement national standards
- Local regulations and policies often require public health agencies to stray from national standards, reducing the positive impact of the standards
- Perception by US state and local PH entities that the value of participation in HL7 is limited; benefit is not greater than cost.
- Cost of participation in working group meetings and HL7 membership, especially as government funding is reduced
Obstacles to progress for the PHER workgroup
[CN1]The uncertainty in government funding, along with meeting costs prevent governmental employees from committing to participation in the various facilitator roles. Government programs frequently need to move quickly to implementation, thus they rely heavily on existing messaging knowledge and implementations (in v2.x) to modify them to meet current needs.
Obstacles include, but are not limited to:
- Participation
- Support for participation, standards development, and standards maintenance
- Enteral pressures limiting time available for proper development (timelines associated with federal incentive programs)
- Education needed for those who wish to participate: It’s hard to keep people interested not just because of the complexity of the subject matter, but also because of the complexity of navigating HL7 itself.
- Education needed for those who wish to implement- targeted to the right audience
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[CN1]Do we just replace “V3” with “FHIR”?