During 23rd-25th April, The Animal Production and Health Division (NSA) held a meeting, at the FAO Headquarters in Rome to define a roadmap for improved interoperability among systems within the One Health threat space based around the WHO SMART Guidelines, with a particular focus on the “operational” and “machine readable” layers (L2 and L3) of that framework.

The specific meeting objectives were:

1. Discuss and define aspects of a Digital Adaptation Kit (DAKs are the major component within the SMART Guidelines) that may be most relevant / important in developing a roadmap for animal health.
2. In the context of meta-data and terminologies/classifications, develop methods to best support interoperability among widely-used open vocabularies (e.g. ICD-11, SNOMED-CT, LOINC, AGROVOC, etc.).
3. Explore the potential of FHIR implementation guides (IG) within animal health to capture the software-neutral specifications that can support interoperability implementation.

Kassy Raymond, GBADs Technical Manager for the Informatics team participated in this meeting and gave a presentation on on interoperability challenges and lessons learned from the GBADs Informatics perspective with focus on the infrastructure developed for the Trusted Animal Information portaL (TAIL). Kassy also participated in discussions regarding interoperability and standards in animal disease surveillance systems.

If you would like to find out more about the presentation, contact gbads@liverpool.ac.uk.