Following the European Commission (EC) recommendation announced in 2019 about the consideration of the possibility offered by resource driven information models for the refinement of the exchange format of the EHRs, the FHIR standard was thoroughly studied, evaluated and selected for implementing interoperability in eHealth4U.
One of the main goals of eHealth4u is to store citizens’ health data in a structured form to facilitate its integration with various 3rd party systems in the national eHealth ecosystem (e.g. public health monitoring systems, etc.). FHIR implementations incorporate structured data allowing resources’ elements to have coded values. In eHealth4U, priority is given in exploiting the fixed value sets provided by FHIR specification.
In addition, a mapping between the EHR fields and the FHIR profiles’ elements was made using SNOMED CT, ICD-11 and LOINC. A mapping between the eHealth4U EHR fields and the Master Value Catalogue (MVC 4.1) was also done and included in the FHIR terminology service to support eHealth services (Patient Summary and ePrescription/eDispensation) across all European countries, as directed by the eHealth Digital Service Infrastructure (eHDSI) initiative and the European Directive 2011/24/EU on patients’ rights on cross border care.
Finally, eHealth4U utilizes a number of IHE profiles which were adopted by the European Commission by the decision (EU) 2015/1302. The selected IHE profiles will help eHealth4U build interoperability for the:
- Identification Service
Provides the means of the identification or recognition of a person or system. - Patient Service – Order Service
Provides the means for retrieving the patient summary from the identified patient’s country of affiliation. - Consent Service
A consent enables the processing of citizen’s health and personal data. - Security and Infrastructure Services
Security and Infrastructure services are required to engage best practices and techniques for successful security engineering in regards to security fundamentals like:
- Data Confidentiality
- Data Integrity
- Data Availability
- User accountability
- Authorization
- Authentication
- Audit Trial
More information can be found in Deliverable D4.2: eHealth4U Interoperability Framework and Testing Strategy.