Telstra Health has partnered with Canadian health information exchange platform vendor Smile Digital Health to bring Smile’s Health Data Platform solution to Australia and New Zealand.

Smile Digital Health markets a clinical data repository (CDR) for healthcare data harmonisation, integration and information sharing, and uses HL7’s Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and its Clinical Quality Language (CQL) authoring language standard for its technology.

Smile’s CDR is built on its “HAPI” open-source implementation of the FHIR specification, which Smile says will give healthcare organisations full access to their network’s data without locking in to any one vendor.

Smile’s platform is used by health agencies, universities, governments, large health information exchange (HIE) companies and the private sector around the world, including the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) in the US to help modernise the HIE.

Smile has also worked on the international patient summary standard, developing a solution that allows jurisdictions and nations to create their own profile for an IPS and automatically extract patient data from existing electronic health record (EHR) systems.

A Telstra Health spokesperson said leveraging Smile Digital Health’s technology and capabilities will enable customers to “implement a FHIR-native technology stack that is built from the ground up to deliver interoperability and data exchange capabilities”.

Telstra Health said that with Australia choosing HL7 FHIR as its healthcare standard, the partnership will also support the mandatory sharing of key health information across care settings, which the federal government intends to start legislating for this year.

The spokesperson said Telstra Health will be able to build upon Smile’s platform with additional components.