The American effort to lower restrictions for the sharing and reuse of Electronic Health Records (EHR) continues on gaining interest from states and private vendors. Now 10 states and 26 vendors will join forces in the HER/HIE Interoperability Workgroup to create standard specifications for connectivity between Health Information Exchange (HIE) and EHR.
The EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup started with 7 states and 11 vendors and created some initial functional and technical specifications. With the expansion of the workgroup, the goal is to create test compliance specifications by March 30. The workgroup elaborated existing standards like the H7 standards to simplify and align the development processes of EHR and HIE to ultimately be able to deliver a set of robust EHR products with integrated capabilities. This should enable providers to more efficiently connect to HIE services across the United States.
According to the workgroup’s website, the specification is based on two use cases. The first use case describes how encrypted health information can be sent and received over the internet. The second use case describes how a clinician can query HIEs for the retrieval of relevant information about a particular patient.
What is happening in Europe?
Action 76 of the Digital Agenda for Europe aims at increased interoperability for patient data to increase a patient’s safety. Therefore the European Commission is working with Member States subject matter experts and all interested stakeholders to propose a recommendation defining a minimal common set of patient data for interoperability of patient records that can be accessed or exchanged electronically across Member States by 2012.
To know more
EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup Website
Action 76 of the Digital Agenda for Europe
Related News item
2012-02-03 - A single electronic identification and authentication area for Europe – STORK 2.0
2012-02-01 - Semantic Interoperability of Medical Knowledge – SemanticHealthNet “Network of Excellence”
Documentation:
Electronic Health Records (EHR)