S03 EP 01: Connecting the dots: global digital health standards and Sparked

Rachel, thanks so much for joining me for this episode today.

Thank you for having me.

I'm very excited to be here.

Yes, absolutely.

For those unfamiliar with you and the work you do, it'd be great for you to provide some context and tell us about what keeps you busy here.

Yes, for sure.

So my name is Rachel Fellner.

I work as a health policy researcher at the OECD.

And for those that don't know, the OECD is an organization between 38 member countries, including Australia.

And we work to provide better policies for better lives at a high level.

I work specifically on the digital health team.

So in that role, we work on policies for health data governance, the responsible scale and adoption of AI in health.

And specifically for the past year, I've been focused on interoperability in health care.

So finding and identifying leading practices, understanding the challenges and opportunities for interoperability of how we can move towards a more integrated digital health ecosystem and develop trusted health data networks within our OECD member countries and around the world.

Fascinating.

And I'd love to get your take on what you see the role of Sparked is within Australia's broader digital health reform agenda.

Yes, for sure.

So as you heard, I don't have an Australia specific focus.

I have a broad global focus, but I have been looking into Sparked.

And I got to speak to some people from Australia during this interview process.

I actually interviewed 41 individuals, including countries and most of the SDOs, so the standards organizations around the world, about interoperability this past year.

And when I see SPARKED, I get quite excited.

I see it as a use case, a catalyst of change and really showing...

Actually, I really like the words that I heard of creating FOMO.

creating the fear of missing out around interoperability because what we see in interoperability today is it is a technical challenge, it is a semantics challenge, but really what we're facing is people.