International Patient Summary (IPS) mainly deployed at national level

In December 2021 the third openForum JIC took place, with an emphasis on IPS. The International Patient Summary is a collaboration between five standards organizations, all members of the Joint Initiative Council on Global Health Informatics Standardization. The starting point is the EN ISO 27269 standard for the structure and content of IPS.

Support for default deployment

In order to implement this standard, the HL7 CDA and HL7 FHIR IPS implementation guides have been developed. These HL7 implementation guides refer, among other things, to the SNOMED CT IPS reference set. It contains all of the care terms relevant to the patient summary and can be used under a “Free for Use” license. Finally, an IHE IPS profile has been developed to make it a testable implementation, with examples and test scripts that can be used during an IHE Connectathon.

Several countries are in the process of introducing IPS within their own national borders, in order to guarantee the continuity of care and at the same time to easily establish the link with cross-border exchanges. You can find more information on this on the new website on the international patient summary launched at the openForum JIC.

National IPS deployment

According to the organization HL7 Netherlands, the Netherlands is also on track towards a national implementation of IPS with the Basic Healthcare Dataset (BgZ). After all, the BgZ is based on the European Patient Summary Directive for Cross-Border Care, on which the Patient Summary is also based. The Netherlands has therefore been rightly included in IPS implementations around the world.

For example, in September, during the HL7 International FHIR Connectathon days, PBL supplier Drimpy sent and received patient data to and from medical information systems in New Zealand and Italy based on the HL7 standard. -FHIR. According to Drimpy, this was the first time that data from BgZin had been put into an IPS and sent from the Netherlands to other countries.

Pay attention to data exchange

The exchange of data in the field of health is explicitly mentioned in the new coalition agreement, in particular with regard to the BgZ and the personal health environment (PBL). The Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP), of which the Netherlands is an active member, also has a working group in which countries work together to present the patient summary. Last summer, the group of large G7 countries explicitly named the summary as a way to give patients access to their own health data.