Company leader
James Agnew
Co-founder and CTO
Smile Digital Health
James Agnew is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Smile Digital Health and the project lead for HAPI FHIR, the open-source Java library that many health software teams use to build on the FHIR standard. He is a co-chair of HL7 and an editor of the FHIR specification.
Hospital Data in Toronto
In the early 2000s he was asked to pull patient results from two hospitals into one web portal, a job the tools of the day made hard. He went on to work with the University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario, and on the city's regional health information projects, including ConnectingGTA.
Leading the HAPI Project
HAPI began in 2001 as an open-source library for the older HL7 version 2 messaging standard, and its name stands for HL7 API. He maintained that library for years. When FHIR arrived, he led the work on HAPI FHIR, which became the project's main focus and the Java reference implementation for the new standard.
Co-founding Smile
He met Duncan Weatherston in 2011 on health integration and data repository projects. The two saw FHIR as the right base for the next generation of health data tools and launched Smile CDR in 2016. When Smile bought the clinical reasoning company Alphora in 2022, he expected it to help customers "extract additional insights and actionable details from their data".
Teaching FHIR
In talks on the standard he stresses how easy FHIR should be to adopt. "FHIR is open like crazy." He has watched capable teams with no FHIR experience reach the point where "within a matter of weeks, they've got it up and running."