A Turkish research consortium is developing a road map for e-health interoperability that would eventually link up the health information systems of EU Member States in a seamless web.
Researchers at the Software Research and Development Centre, based in the Middle East Technical University (METU), have found that Europeans are more mobile than ever before, but although European health services have introduced sophisticated electronic information management systems, they are often designed to work on a local level and are often not interoperable.
With EU funding, they have developed RIDE, an interoperability solution designed to link up regional and national health information systems into a seamless European web.
RIDE is a roadmap project for interoperability of e-health systems leading to recommendations for actions and to preparatory actions at the European level.
The project’s nine partners in seven countries have already drawn up two draft versions of their e-health interoperability road map and work is in progress on the final version. This document complements the objectives of the Commission’s e-health action plan, particularly with regard to semantic interoperability.
“Two crucial principles have been identified by the RIDE project. The first is the central leadership of the European Commission in coordinating 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,” said Asuman Dogac, a professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at METU.
Tackling the ‘interoperability challenge’ requires EU Member States to make concerted efforts to create national and Union-wide interoperability, Dogac added:
“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. This enhanced mobility has brought with it challenges. What happens if a person falls sick away from home or moves to another part of the country or another country altogether?
“The establishment of e-health 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.”
According to Dogac, in the future Europeans will be able to go anywhere and not sense any difference in the quality of healthcare they receive. Doctors and other health professionals 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 rights, but also by the patients themselves.
She said: “Healthcare has changed significantly, with fewer people sticking to the same doctor, more patients visiting different specialists, health workers moving around more, as well as the emergence of e-health technologies which allow remote treatment and consultations.
“RIDE will help to benchmark good practice and promote the exchange of experience. It will also formulate ‘visionary’ scenarios, map out the gap between the current situation and the desired future situation and document the limitations of current policies and strategies.”
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Joe Fernandez