OFF TO NEPAL
Four members of PHA4GE will be heading to Nepal soon, there to run a workshop on data foundations in partnership with the International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN). IPSN, a regular PHA4GE collaborator, is a global initiative hosted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) dedicated to tracking infectious disease threats using genomic surveillance. Making the trip to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, will be Dr Emma Griffiths and Charlotte Barclay (Simon Fraser University, Canada) on behalf of PHA4GE’s Data Structures Working Group (DSWG), as well as Dr Daniel Park (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, US), and Peter van Heusden (South African National Bioinformatics Institute, South Africa) on behalf on the Infrastructure Working Group. The workshop will focus on infrastructure and data standards/interoperability, as well as the funding and financial aspects of genomic surveillance.
IN OTHER NEWS
The DSWG is also working on several new standards. This includes a draft pathogen-agnostic minimal metadata specification, and a genotyping specification, the latter in collaboration with the ESCMID Study Group for Epidemiological Markers (ESGEM), a scientific working group of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID).
GOING ON RECORD
As part of a project titled GenomeX – Pathogen Genomics, members of the DSWG are also working with HL7 FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (pronounced “fire”), to integrate PHA4GE standards into healthcare interoperability resources. For years, says the DSWG’s Dr Emma Griffiths, there have been questions about how PHA4GE standards interact with clinical systems. “We are now trying to address this,” Griffiths notes. HL7 FHIR is a technical standard developed by Health Level Seven International (HL7), an international standards-developing organisation, to aid the exchange and interoperability of healthcare data globally. The long-term goals of this project are to improve the integration of host and pathogen data, as well as the interoperability between clinical and public health systems/data. “We are actively seeking participation to make sure we represent lots of countries, systems, pathogens, and needs,” says Griffiths.
