Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Friday, January 14, 2011

Now Here is Some Real Progress! Amazing Transnational Co-operation!

This came over my desk a few weeks ago

epSOS Projectathon determines next steps

08 Dec 2010

An epSOS Projectathon held in Slovakia to test whether the interoperability of different countries' healthcare systems meet epSOS specifications concluded that 10 pilot sites can begin sharing real patient data from early next year.

epSOS, the large scale European pilot of patient summary and electronic prescription, held the four day Projectathon to test content documents, such as patient summaries and e-prescription exchanges.

It also allowed national developers and testers to share knowledge and experience and addressed issues such as improving security, semantic interoperability, and avoiding other real patient safety issues.

In addition it saw nine countries - Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Sweden and Slovakia - successfully test cross-border patient data exchange.

More here:

http://www.ehealtheurope.net/news/6490/epsos_projectathon_determines_next_steps

The link to the project is here:

http://www.epsos.eu/

The description on the site is as follows:

About epSOS

Smart Open Services for European Patients - epSOS, (previously known as S.O.S. - "Smart Open Services", an Open eHealth initiative for a large scale European pilot of patient summary and electronic prescription) is a Europe-wide project organized by 27 beneficiaries representing twelve EU-member states, including ministries of health, national competence centres and numerous companies. This makes it the first European eHealth project clustering such a large number of countries in practical cooperation.

The overarching goal of epSOS is to develop a practical eHealth framework and an Information & Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure that will enable secure access to patient health information, particularly with respect to basic patient summaries and ePrescriptions between different European healthcare systems.

The project is co-financed by the European Commission within the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP). epSOS was launched on July 1, 2008 and will be in progress for 36 months.

To achieve this goal, the national entitities cooperating within epSOS test both services in pilot applications, which interconnect national solutions. The approach, which is based on advanced and distinct use cases and associated infrastructural components, aims to deliver both a methodological process and durable implementations: building blocks. These building blocks will form the basis for a longer term, pan-European approach to develop interoperable service solutions.

The project is structured into work packages (WPs) which analyze the current situation in the participating countries, explore the legal questions, develop technical specifications covering all basic components of secure use of personalised health data, and finally set-up the test environment where the findings can be validated in a close to real life situation.

Dissemination and communication activities will accompany the project throughout the entire period, supported by the CALLIOPE Thematic Network.

----- End description.

Now if we could get the various States of Australia to be as advanced and co-operative as this!

Sounds like pretty good stuff to me! It will be good to hear in due course how these ambitious pilots go!

David.

1 comment:

Thomas Beale said...

Unfortunately, epSOS information and terminology approach is absolutely primitive, and semantic characteristics pretty well non-existent. Its main achievement has been to get 20+ countries to agree on something (anything) rather than nothing at all. The technical part of it is not reusable in any meaningful sense, and does not incorporate any knowledge that was unavailable 15 years ago.