Focus on Public Health and AI at HL7 Workshops: Potential for Data Sharing using FHIR
BLOG Public health, decision support, and AI took center stage at HL7's latest workgroup meeting
Summary
HLN participated in the HL7 event held in September 2025, focusing particularly on the application of decision support (CDS) and AI in public health. It was shown that existing FHIR APIs can be leveraged to enhance data access for public health, providing actionable information to care providers.
Details
HLN participated in the HL7 40th FHIR Connectathon and 39th Annual Plenary, Working Group Meeting held from September 13-19, 2025. During this time, the company actively engaged in the Public Health and Clinical Decision Support workgroup meetings, aiming to enhance decision support capabilities for immunization forecasting and electronic case reporting (eCR), while also tracking movement towards FHIR R6. A notable technical development was the new Symptom FHIR resource. This provides comprehensive information—including onset, duration, intensity, frequency, functional impact, etc.—and is expected to be useful in reportable conditions for eCR and HLN’s open-source immunization evaluation and forecasting software (ICE). Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a major theme at this year's conference, featuring keynote speeches from several prominent experts. These sessions covered broad topics such as data liquidity, patient control of data, and curbing information blocking. HLN is advancing its efforts focusing on FHIR Query and Response use cases for public health, aiming to contribute to public health through data sharing using existing APIs.
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