Meet the Standards Development Organisations

Digital Health Standards underpin the digitally connected future that is desired for all Australians.

They are generally categorised into six main groups:  

• Transport & Messaging - message formatting for data exchange between systems
• Terminology & Vocabulary - structured classification systems for unanimous understanding of health concepts
• Security - protection of control over personal or organisational information
• Privacy - protection of data integrity and confidentiality
• Identifiers - unique identification of an individual provider, patient, organisation, medicine, location or device
• Content - organisation and structure of message content (data)

With digital processes also now relied on heavily for clinical processes, we can often also include Clinical standards as a seventh category when considering how we ensure interoperability of data and connected care.  

How are standards created?  

The creation and maintenance of these standards is largely the domain of a group of Standards Development Organisations (SDO) or SDO-Like organisations where they create standards or publish standards as a result of their broader work, often these are default standards or frameworks but may also be regulatory. Formal Standards Development Organisations have user focussed, consensus-based, formal processes that are used to manage their standards development processes. SDO-Like organisations will often consult users but may not have the same process to allow for voting by users.  

Access to standards

The Digital Health Standards Catalogue endeavours to provide access to as many of the relevant Digital Health standards as possible and will continue to grow over time to cater to the wide number of use cases in the sector. Many of the standards that are included are ‘open’ standards meaning that there are no costs for users to access and can be used royalty free. Where standards have fees that apply this is indicated in the summaries for the standards.  

Find out more about the organisations behind the standards via the below links.