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 EuroRec welcomes the European eHealth Governance Initiative (eHGI) on semantic and technical interoperability.

The European eHealth Governance Initiative (eHGI) has published a discussion paper on semantic and technical interoperability which the EuroRec Institute warmly welcomes. EuroRec was established to encourage the development and implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) together with the creation of a system for quality labelling supported by an extensive range of clinical criteria.

The initiative states “Continuity of care is a key priority for modern healthcare delivery. It enables a high quality of care, in particular for citizens with chronic conditions. Continuity of care in turn relies on seamless communication between all actors involved in the healthcare process”

eHGI is a project sponsored by the European Commission, comprising representatives from ministries of health across Europe, tasked with developing a framework for the governance of eHealth programs with particular emphasis on the support of future pan-European cross-border health care services. This discussion paper declares the priority healthcare benefits that semantic and technical interoperability needs to enable, and highlights the key challenges with achieving such interoperability today. The report makes nine key policy recommendations:

1. Encourage greater cooperation between Member States
2. Encourage greater cooperation between national authorities and standardisation bodies
3. Enable the recommendation of standards and (harmonised) profiles based on selected use cases
4. Use purchasing power of public sector as enabler for semantic and technical interoperability
5. Foster data portability
6. Link and harmonise coding systems
7. Facilitate access to existing standards and medical vocabularies
8. Stimulate usability engineering for structured and encoded data
9. Consider incentivisation of healthcare providers

EuroRec has provided input to the eHGI during the development of this paper, for example through the participation of representatives of SemanticHealthNet (led by EuroRec) at a joint workshop in September. EuroRec is a longstanding promoter of eHealth interoperability, for example through the recent EHR-Q^TN project.

Commenting on the initiative EuroRec President, Dipak Kalra, said "This discussion paper from the eHealth Governance Initiative presents a clear and positive plan of action on interoperability, for the benefit of healthcare across Europe. EuroRec is very pleased to support these recommendations and, together with our network of national ProRec Centres, contribute to the work of achieving them."

Notes for editors

EuroRec
The EUROREC Institute (EuroRec) is an independent not-for-profit organisation, promoting in Europe the use of high quality Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs). One of its main missions is to support, as the European authorised certification body, EHRs certification development, testing and assessment by defining functional and other criteria. EuroRec is organised as a permanent network of National ProRec centres and provides services to industry (developers and vendors), healthcare providers (buyers), policy makers and patients.

For more information contact: Dipak Kalra @ www.eurorec.org

The eHGI document

The eHGI discussion paper may be downloaded here.
https://www.ehgi.eu/Download/eHealth%20Network%20-%20eHGI%20Discussion%20Paper%20Semantic%20and%20Technical%20Interoperability-2012-10-22.pdf

SemanticHealthNet

Semantic interoperability of EHR systems is a crucial prerequisite for enabling patient-centred care and advanced clinical and biomedical research. SemanticHealthNet will develop a scalable and sustainable pan-European organisational and governance process to achieve this objective across healthcare systems and institutions.

A clinical focus on chronic heart failure and cardiovascular prevention in the workplan shall define the semantic resources to be developed. The exemplars in cardiology and public health are specific enough to permit comprehensive development and validation of these resources, and yet typical enough for wider generalisation of the methodology and its governance.  SemanticHealthNet will capture the needs articulated by clinicians and public health experts for evidence-based, patient-centred integrated care in these domains. Existing European consensus in the management of chronic heart failure and cardiovascular prevention will then be integrated in EHR architectures, clinical data structures, terminologies and ontology by leading technical experts.

EHR-Q-TN

This project promotes certification by organising national workshops in 27 different European countries, by validating the EuroRec functional statements (over 1.400 statements), translating a substantial set of them in over 20 different European languages and by validating the EuroRec certification tools and certification procedures. The focus functionalities of the validation and the translations to be addressed during the project will be on medicinal product prescriptions, on medication management, on summary records as well as on generic statements regarding reliability and trustworthiness of the systems and on security and access management.
 

Source:Press Release