Review deliverable

Dear colleagues,

The eStandards project has the ambition to provide a Roadmap and associated evidence base, a white paper on the need for formal standards. For supporting this roadmap, eStandards will deliver guidelines and study reports and among them, the study report on “cost effectiveness of the use of standards-driven toolsets for designing, developing and deploying interoperable solutions or products”.

This study analyzes from the stakeholders point of view, what is the perception of the use of the standards-driven tools and if the use of the tools is economically advantageous for fostering eHealth development in Europe. To promote standards in eHealth, we consider that the best way is to propose to the stakeholders, assets (for example modeling tools, testing tools) based on standards that will facilitate implementation of standards and interoperability. This cost-effectiveness report provides evidence of the benefit of this approach.

The main findings of the study are that all stakeholder categories that were consulted agree on the interest to use standard driven tools because it increases the quality of the products (all) by continuously improving the specification (centers of competence and industry) and increasing the efficiency of the production (industry and standards organizations). Other qualifications selected were developing partnerships (centers of competence), recognition (industry) and economy of scale or facilitating training to standards.

In term of costs, the impression of the stakeholders is that using such tools reduces time to reach the market (gain of several months of effort for developing new projects or products, time saving of 25% for specific project, reduction of bugs). However, they highlighted that all these benefits are only possible if the standards are not ambiguous and are of good quality. Tools help to increase and to maintain the expected quality.

Finally, recommendations emerging from this small study are expressed in the study. For more details, see www.estandards-project.eu and provide your feedbacks and comments before 31 march 2017

We would be grateful if you could review this deliverable, and provide your response to it. You can write a general comment(s) about the deliverable on this comment form. At the same time you are kindly invited to comment specific sections of the deliverable in the PDF viewer (more about commenting in pdf).

We thank you in anticipation for your collaboration.

Dear colleagues,

As the focus of interoperability in healthcare increasingly emphasises the importance of exchanging clinical information, often between EHRs, there is a corresponding need to grow our collective portfolios of clinical content standards. These standards need to be cocreated with domain experts, and be trusted by them, so that they can confidently rely upon the quality and semantic interoperability of clinical data coming from other systems.

eStandards has consulted with several example standards, profile and other specification development organisations, and other projects and initiatives, on the processes they currently use to develop clinical content assets. From this we have derived a generalised methodology, which is published as a content development guideline for organisations such as yours. Although initially targeting the clinical content required for eEIF use cases, we believe that this guideline should have wider applicability for the development of new areas of clinical content and for the harmonisation of existing clinical content specifications.

We would be grateful if you could review this deliverable, and provide your response to it. You can write a general comment(s) about the deliverable on this comment form. At the same time you are kindly invited to comment specific sections of the deliverable in the PDF viewer (more about commenting in pdf).

May we kindly ask you to return your comments before November 19, 2016?

If you feel it appropriate, we would appreciate if you would be willing to send us a scan of a letter of support (endorsement) for this guideline.

This document will inform a subsequent eStandards deliverable on recommendations, and will inform our promotion activities of good practice in the interoperability of clinical content. We thank you for your comments.

Dear colleagues,

We would be grateful if you could review this deliverable, and provide your response to it. You can write a general comment(s) about the deliverable on this comment form. At the same time you are kindly invited to comment specific sections of the deliverable in the PDF viewer (more about commenting in pdf).

May we kindly ask you to return your comments before April 17, 2017?

If you feel it appropriate, we would appreciate if you would be willing to send us a scan of a letter of support (endorsement) for this guideline.

This document will inform a subsequent eStandards deliverable on recommendations, and will inform our promotion activities of good practice in the interoperability of clinical content. We thank you for your comments.