SWOT ANALYSIS – Devices (DEV) WG
Strengths
- Expert membership on health device informatics and clinical information systems
- Core membership consistently contributes and attends regularly due to commitment to the domain
- Provides a home for device-related work within HL7
- Strong (UML) modelling expertise
- Strong ontology and nomenclature expertise
- Members engage with a cooperative spirit
- DEV WG interworks with, and leverages work and experts of other HL7 WGs
- DEV WG WG works with other standards development organizations concerned with the same and related goals.
- Benefits from strong international participation in WG work.
- Deploying outputs in productive interoperable solutions in IHE
- Products assessed for interop conformance by NIST before publication
Weaknesses
- Limited participation by providers/clinicians
- Limited participants with international regulatory expertise.
- Limited member work capacity due to other time and resource commitments
- Limited availability and continuity of funding to advance standardization work
- Need to rejuvenate participants and membership
- Maintaining domain depth of knowledge and succession planning
- Need more expertise in mobile, cloud-connected technology, and consumer health devices
- Subject matter not well understood outside of the WG, meaning WG needs to make more effort to assure that the special characteristics of device-related use cases are cl
- ear to other HL7 WGs when relevant.
Opportunities
- Leverage the enthusiasm around FHIR to advance the use of health device information in a broader range of healthcare applications
- Educate others on device communications
- Promote a consistent, harmonized approach to device informatics across the industry based on established standards
- Leverage evolving paradigm of cloud, AI and internet of things and services
Threats
- Collaboration requests from other HL7 WGs at times exceed capacity and often arrive too late in the process for effective process and architectural alignment.
- Market forces in the absence of cooperative business models that value the use of standards-based technology will drive alternative solutions
Adopted by vote at WGM 2023-01-18