James Read Memorial Lecture panel at SNOMED CT Expo 2025, featuring AeHIN’s Executive Director (third from left) | Image credit: SNOMED International
The Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) participated in the SNOMED CT Expo 2025 held in Antwerp, Belgium from 22–24 October 2025.
Experts from across the global digital health community convened at the event. The discussions centered on terminology, interoperability, and digital health innovation. AeHIN was represented by Executive Director Mr. Jai Ganesh Udayasankaran, reflecting AeHIN’s active role in connecting Asia’s digital health community with the global standards ecosystem. Several members of the AeHIN community also attended the Expo on behalf of their institutions, including Mr. Intouch Laobandit (AeHIN Secretariat, Thailand) and Ms. Manisha Mantri (AeHIN Working Council).
The James Read Memorial Lecture (JRML) is a keynote feature of the Expo event and embodies the practical application of SNOMED CT in real world settings. The Lecture at this year’s Expo featured a panel discussion focused on ‘Regional Approaches to Interoperability’ highlighting initiatives that are making broader interoperability possible in Latin American Countries (LAC), Europe and Asia Pacific.
During the James Read Memorial Lecture panel held on 24th October morning, Mr. Jai Ganesh Udayasankaran shared AeHIN’s mission to strengthen national digital health programs, promote standards-based interoperability, advance health data governance, capacity-building and training efforts in the region. He also highlighted AeHIN’s convergence workshop approach focused towards supporting countries in development, periodic review/update and implementation of their national digital health strategies and emphasized AeHIN’s active collaboration with SNOMED International through the Community of Interoperability Laboratories (COIL). He outlined how AeHIN plans to operationalize the collaboration agreement with SNOMED International and responded to the questions from Dr. Charles Gutteridge, the moderator of the panel. The other panelists in the discussion were Mr. Pablo Orefice representing RACSEL, the Latin American and Caribbean digital health network and Dr. Petr Holub representing European Research Infrastructure Consortium for Biobanking and BioMolecular Resources (BBMRI-ERIC).
AeHIN’s participation at SNOMED CT Expo reaffirmed the partnership between AeHIN and SNOMED International to promote greater awareness, education, and capacity-building for adoption of SNOMED CT in the region. This collaboration calls for the provision of representation and guidance on the use of other standards with SNOMED CT for semantic interoperability highlighting the shared objectives of both the organizations towards interoperability of health data.
AeHIN remains committed to advancing interoperable, standards-based digital health systems through collaboration, knowledge sharing, and capacity building in the region.