Over the past decade, Ilya Beda has launched over 30 projects in digital health on top of FHIR. He is now working with the Digital Health CRC on our flagship Kinnexus SMART on FHIR Quality Indicator app for aged care. Here, Ilya shares his journey and passion for digital health innovation in creating a truly connected healthcare ecosystem.
Tell us about your career journey to date.
I headed into Health IT over a decade ago after five years running my general software development consulting company. My first project in digital health was with a professor from the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on a prediction algorithm to classify skin moles as malignant or benign. He needed a mobile application to deliver this algorithm to end users, and my role was to build that application.
That project sparked my interest in the healthcare technology space. As I explored the field further, I discovered FHIR and began using it as a framework for healthcare-related projects. Becoming familiar with FHIR opened up an entirely new stream of opportunities. I started working extensively on EHR integrations, building solutions that connected with systems such as Epic, Cerner, and other EMR platforms widely used in the U.S. market.
Then I became a part of the International FHIR community. I joined the Questionnaire work groups and started giving talks at multiple international events. That’s how I met Graham Grieve, the creator of FHIR. All these connections in the FHIR community helped me to get the Australian Global Talent Visa.
Once I came to Australia, I started exploring the local Health IT market. With the launch of the Sparked initiative in Australia, demand for FHIR-related solutions has increased significantly. As a result, I’m now seeing growing opportunities to apply my experience and do more work locally in Australia.
How did you become so ingrained in the FHIR community?
I simply joined the community. That’s really the power of an open standard and an open community. Anyone can participate.
About eight years ago, I started attending the Questionnaire Work Group calls because I wanted to better understand how to use the Structured Data Capture (SDC) Implementation Guide properly. At first, I was mostly there to learn. Over time, I began sharing my own ideas and contributing feedback to the specification itself. Since the group was relatively small at the time, it was easy to get involved and have meaningful discussions. From there, I started participating in more international meetings and eventually had opportunities to speak at international events.
Because the underlying framework and collaboration model is the same globally, it was natural to transfer that experience when contributing in Australia. I’ve since been able to apply what I learned internationally to contribute to initiatives such as AU Core, AU eRequesting, and AU Patient Summary.
Stepping back for those who don’t know about FHIR or the Sparked community
The Sparked community is a group of passionate, diverse health IT experts (software developers, practitioners, government, and vendors) who are working together to resolve issues with the current infrastructure in the Australian Healthcare system.
You have launched over 30 projects in digital health on top of FHIR. Tell us about the latest one, Kinnexus?
Kinnexus seamlessly delivers the ability to assess care for residents of Aged Care facilities with InterRAI LTCF tool. The system captures assessment data in real time, automatically aggregates anonymised Quality Indicator statistics, and submits the required reports directly to the government’s statistical collection API.
This approach delivers value across the entire aged care ecosystem. For residents, the InterRAI LTCF assessments support the development of more accurate and personalised care plans. For clinical staff, the system significantly reduces administrative burden—data is entered once and then reused across multiple workflows, eliminating repetitive data entry. For clinical care and facility management, reporting of quality indicators is fully automated, removing a substantial amount of manual work and reducing the risk of errors caused by duplicated or inconsistent data.
The close collaboration process between Beda, interRAI, and Digital Health CRC, has significantly contributed to the success we have had developing Kinnexus. Kinnexus is a complex project requiring different expertise. Beda, as a tech guru, contributes their knowledge about international and local standards. However, every standard should implement specific clinical workflows, and it is the place where exceptional clinical knowledge of the interRAI team helped a lot. And finally, a business value should be clearly defined, the project will not be commercially sustainable. Digital Health CRC developed a way for the interRAI LTCF assessment to be used as a source for B2G Quality Indicator reporting. This approach demonstrates how clinical and business domains help each other. These kinds of solutions require deep communication and collaboration among all the stakeholders. We have achieved it and implemented Kinnexus together.
From a technical perspective, Kinnexus is one of the largest FHIR-based projects that Beda Software has delivered in the Australian market. It demonstrates how FHIR can support all aspects of modern healthcare application development.
What excites you most about digital health innovation like Kinnexus?
What excites me most about digital health innovation like Kinnexus is the shift toward truly connected, FHIR-native healthcare ecosystems. For the first time, we can design systems to be interoperable from day one. This kind of FHIR-native application uses FHIR as its primary internal API. You don’t need to maintain your database schema or API version. FHIR takes care of it. You can focus on the end-user problems. It unlocks the full potential of healthcare data to drive better decisions, smarter care plans, and more personalised patient experiences.
What does the future hold for digital health tech?
I hope we’ll see many more applications like Kinnexus that follow a truly FHIR-native approach. As more vendors provide AU Core–compliant APIs for seamless integration and implement SMART app galleries within their products, the ecosystem will open up significantly and allow data to flow across the sector.
This will allow developers to build specialised interfaces, workflows, or clinical forms for niche use cases and medical specialties that are not typically supported by default in practice management systems. Instead of waiting for vendors to implement every feature, healthcare organisations will be able to extend their systems much more easily.
This shift in paradigm enables PMS platforms to become extensible ecosystems. It ultimately leads to better software for clinicians, more tailored solutions for specific care scenarios, and, most importantly, helps unlock healthcare data from traditional vendor silos.
