IABtalks Keynote Speaker – Russ Leftwich, MD Innovations in Achieving Interoperability May 4, 2018 I’m going to talk about innovations in achieving interoperability, and I think we don’t usually think of data standards as innovative. But I’m going to change your mind, I think. FHIR, which is HL7’s newest clinical data standard, is in itself an innovation, and it enables innovation for people using healthcare data. Now, one thing that’s happened that makes FHIR a necessary innovation, if you will, is that the meaning of interoperability has really changed. In the 1980s, interoperability was about connecting two systems together. And that’s where the data standards we use today came from. They were built to connect one system to another system, and then we’ve leveraged those standards to connect one system to multiple systems. But those standards really weren’t designed to do that, and in the current decade, there was an estimate a few years ag