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Increasingly, public health is being expected to process large volumes of data, at faster and faster paces. This includes not just laboratory results, case reports, and immunizations but additional information contained in the entire electronic health record (EHR) and other data sources. While the public health community and their partners have already made significant investments and progress in sharing data electronically, challenges remain that must be addressed. As part of the Data Modernization Initiative, the CDC and ONC are supporting projects to help identify ways that the FHIR standard can be leveraged to benefit public health in ways that complement and extend the existing interoperability infrastructure already in use today.

Helios, a FHIR Accelerator for Public Health, is a multi-sector alliance that is committed to advancing public health interoperability by developing, testing, and supporting widespread implementation of FHIR APIs and applications that are compatible with the FHIR APIs and profiles that are going into production related to the 21st Century Cures Act. Helios will provide streamlined ways for diverse stakeholders to align and adapt existing artifacts and approaches to meet high-priority, cross-cutting public health needs.

The Accelerator aims to identify gaps in the existing FHIR standards and artefacts which are impairing the adoption of FHIR by the public health community. Helios will then work to develop standards, approaches and tools to fill these gaps and promote real-world adoption with an emphasis on developing and disseminating products that can be recombined and reused across a variety of workflows and interactions.

The Helios FHIR Accelerator for Public Health is happy to announce that we are soliciting community ideas and feedback on which use cases Helios should focus on in 2022. Please visit Helios’ 2022 Use Cases page for more details on how you can help shape the future of the Helios Accelerator. As always, if you have any questions, please reach out to us at helios@hl7.org. Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas.