Using open source strategies to enable medical data exchange at scale
Room B | Wed 21 Jan 11:40 a.m.–12:25 p.m.
Presented by
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Christopher Skene
https://aurabox.cloud
Christopher Skene is a seasoned technology leader with two decaded of experience driving innovation at the intersection of healthcare, government, and open-source. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aurabox, a pioneering platform that enables seamless access, sharing, and analysis of medical imaging for clinicians, researchers, and patients.
Christopher has held senior leadership roles across engineering, architecture, consulting, and enterprise growth, consistently bridging technical and non-technical teams to deliver transformative digital platforms. His work includes creating GovCMS, the Australian Government’s open-source CMS platform, spearheading Platform.sh’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region, and over a decades work helping to grow Drupal in APAC.
With a background spanning PHP, Rust, Node, and Python, Christopher blends deep technical expertise with a strong focus on healthcare interoperability, privacy, and cloud-native innovation. Today, his work centres on building secure, scalable platforms that empower clinicians, hospitals, and patients to collaborate around complex imaging and AI in medicine.
Christopher Skene
https://aurabox.cloud
Christopher Skene is a seasoned technology leader with two decaded of experience driving innovation at the intersection of healthcare, government, and open-source. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aurabox, a pioneering platform that enables seamless access, sharing, and analysis of medical imaging for clinicians, researchers, and patients.
Christopher has held senior leadership roles across engineering, architecture, consulting, and enterprise growth, consistently bridging technical and non-technical teams to deliver transformative digital platforms. His work includes creating GovCMS, the Australian Government’s open-source CMS platform, spearheading Platform.sh’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region, and over a decades work helping to grow Drupal in APAC.
With a background spanning PHP, Rust, Node, and Python, Christopher blends deep technical expertise with a strong focus on healthcare interoperability, privacy, and cloud-native innovation. Today, his work centres on building secure, scalable platforms that empower clinicians, hospitals, and patients to collaborate around complex imaging and AI in medicine.
Abstract
Healthcare data interoperability is one of the most complex and contested challenges in technology today. Imaging sits at the heart of this challenge: large, sensitive, and siloed, it is notoriously difficult to share and integrate across institutions. Yet it is essential for delivering better patient outcomes, enabling research, and supporting new models of care.
This session will explore how an open, public model and specification can be used to drive change in such a difficult industry. We will share our work on the (Harmony Proxy)[https://harmonyproxy.com), an open source interoperability toolkit designed for medical data, and its alignment with the Imaging Exchange Framework and Medical Data Gateway specification (MDG).
Harmony Proxy is a lightweight, extensible system that bridges healthcare standards like DICOM, DICOMweb, FHIR, and emerging APIs. By releasing it under an open licence, we aim to provide a transparent, public-domain tool that anyone can adopt, adapt, and build upon. This approach not only lowers barriers for clinicians and developers, but also establishes a foundation for new forms of collaboration across hospitals, vendors, and governments.
We will also set this work against the backdrop of HealthConnect, Australia’s new national digital health program, which is driving significant industry change. By situating Harmony Proxy within this broader context, we show how open source infrastructure and public specifications can support large-scale policy initiatives while remaining accessible to smaller clinics and innovators.
Key themes covered in the session:
- Why medical imaging is one of the hardest interoperability problems.
- The Imaging Exchange Framework and the role of the MDG as a unifying model.
- How Harmony Proxy provides a practical, open source implementation of these ideas.
- Lessons from releasing interoperability tools into the public domain.
- The opportunities and risks of aligning with large-scale initiatives like HealthConnect.
Takeaways:
Attendees will gain insight into the technical and social strategies required to build interoperability in healthcare. They will learn how public models and open toolkits can accelerate change in conservative industries, and how these approaches might be applied in their own domains.
This talk is aimed at developers, architects, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of open source, healthcare, and data standards.
Healthcare data interoperability is one of the most complex and contested challenges in technology today. Imaging sits at the heart of this challenge: large, sensitive, and siloed, it is notoriously difficult to share and integrate across institutions. Yet it is essential for delivering better patient outcomes, enabling research, and supporting new models of care.
This session will explore how an open, public model and specification can be used to drive change in such a difficult industry. We will share our work on the (Harmony Proxy)[https://harmonyproxy.com), an open source interoperability toolkit designed for medical data, and its alignment with the Imaging Exchange Framework and Medical Data Gateway specification (MDG).
Harmony Proxy is a lightweight, extensible system that bridges healthcare standards like DICOM, DICOMweb, FHIR, and emerging APIs. By releasing it under an open licence, we aim to provide a transparent, public-domain tool that anyone can adopt, adapt, and build upon. This approach not only lowers barriers for clinicians and developers, but also establishes a foundation for new forms of collaboration across hospitals, vendors, and governments.
We will also set this work against the backdrop of HealthConnect, Australia’s new national digital health program, which is driving significant industry change. By situating Harmony Proxy within this broader context, we show how open source infrastructure and public specifications can support large-scale policy initiatives while remaining accessible to smaller clinics and innovators.
Key themes covered in the session:
- Why medical imaging is one of the hardest interoperability problems.
- The Imaging Exchange Framework and the role of the MDG as a unifying model.
- How Harmony Proxy provides a practical, open source implementation of these ideas.
- Lessons from releasing interoperability tools into the public domain.
- The opportunities and risks of aligning with large-scale initiatives like HealthConnect.
Takeaways: Attendees will gain insight into the technical and social strategies required to build interoperability in healthcare. They will learn how public models and open toolkits can accelerate change in conservative industries, and how these approaches might be applied in their own domains.
This talk is aimed at developers, architects, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of open source, healthcare, and data standards.