Developing a pan-European health web

A research consortium is seeking to chart a road map for ehealth interoperability that would eventually hook up the health information systems of EU member states in a seamless web.

Europeans are more mobile than ever before, moving not only around their own countries, but also across a largely borderless EU, in pursuit of leisure, education, career advancement or cultural enrichment. In addition, healthcare has changed significantly, with fewer people staying with the same doctor, more patients visiting different specialists, health workers moving around more, as well as the emergence of ehealth technologies that allow remote treatment and consultations.

Although European health services have introduced sophisticated electronic information management systems, these are often designed to work on a local level and are often not interoperable.

To tackle this challenge, EU member states and the EU have mounted concerted efforts to create national and Union-wide interoperability.

An EU-funded international project, The Roadmap for Interoperability of eHealth Systems (RIDE), seeks to chart a route for EU member states to enable their national e-health networks to talk to and understand one another.

“The establishment of ehealth interoperability at the European level will create a win-win situation for various kinds of stakeholders that are involved in any phase of health delivery process,” explains Asuman Dogac, a professor at the Department of Computer Engineering of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

According to Professor Dogac, in the future, Europeans will ideally be able to go anywhere and not sense any difference in the quality of healthcare they receive. doctors and health bodies will be able to access information on foreign patients just as easily as they do for local ones, and patient records will be accessible at any time from anywhere not only for professionals with the necessary access right but also for the patients themselves.

Making this dream a reality requires sophisticated interoperability solutions to link up regional and national health information systems into a seamless European web.

The RIDE project’s nine partners in seven countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Turkey) have already drawn up two draft versions of its e-health interoperability road map and work is in progress on the final version. This document complements the objectives of the Commission’s eHealth action plan, particularly with regard to semantic interoperability.

“Two crucial principles have been identified by the RIDE project,” said Professor Dogac. “The first is the central leadership of the European Commission in co-ordinating Member State activities and the second is the need for an incremental deployment process in which growing (in physical coverage) and evolving (increasing functionality) pilots are being developed across Member States.”

To achieve this, RIDE has benchmarked good practice and promoted the exchange of experience. It has also formulated ‘visionary’ scenarios, mapped out the gap between the current situation and the desired future one and documented the limitations of current policies and strategies.

One of the good practice cases identified by RIDE was Medcom, the Danish healthcare network. It provides national standards for communication flows relating to referrals, discharge letters, laboratory results, x-rays, prescriptions and billing between hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories and other related institutes. It is used almost universally in Denmark, with 97% of general practitioners, 74% of fulltime specialists, all pharmacies and hospitals utilising the system.

In order to achieve interoperability at European level, it is necessary that this kind of widely used national network is established in all EU Member States. Then, the interoperability of these networks can be realised through well-defined interfaces.

More information

More information and publications can be found on the RIDE website: www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/webpage/projects/ride/

Sources: ICT Results; A Roadmap for Interoperability of eHealth Systems in Support of COM 356 with Special Emphasis on Semantic Interoperability (RIDE).