In May 2021, the ALEX platform fully implemented with FHIR API was officially launched and used in New Zealand. This platform is a medical informationization project jointly participated by Medtech, Odin Health, Microsoft, HL7 New Zealand, and other companies and organizations, with Medtech as the lead.

As the core middleware component of the ALEX platform, the Odin NeXT cloud-native platform provides powerful integration and extension capabilities, realizing the standardized mapping of heterogeneous data, and providing high concurrency, low latency, stability, and large-scale scalability. Odin NeXT works with Microsoft's solution stack to achieve complex and difficult functions such as FHIR conversion, code set mapping, database lookup, API communication, log recording, and alerts.

Geoffrey Sayer, CEO of Medtech, fully acknowledged Odin's contribution: “Thanks Eric and Odin Health for the great work so far and the great work still to come. Been pretty cool working with all the great people who are the best at what they do. Many smart hands, makes heavy and complex, light and simple.”

Around 900 practices in New Zealand, which accounts for over 90% of primary healthcare data, are covered by ALEX platform. For more information, please refer to the article Unlocking NZ Primary Care Data - ALEX And Odin Healthand the case study Connecting primary care with ALEX.

What is FHIR?

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a new generation of standard framework proposed by HL7, which integrates the advantages of HL7 V2, V3, and CDA. FHIR is built on modular components called "resources," which include management concepts for patients, medical personnel, medical institutions, and equipment, as well as many clinical concepts covering diseases, medications, diagnoses, care plans, and finance, with strong interoperability.

Why does the ALEX project adopt FHIR?

At the beginning of the design of the ALEX project, the goal was to create a platform that could cross vendors and be used by other vendors. Therefore, the interface cannot be designed specifically for vendor-specific custom designs but needs to be based on a common technology stack and international standards. In international standards, HL7 v2 cannot meet the requirements, only HL7 v3 and FHIR can be implemented. After comprehensive consideration, FHIR was chosen.