Background
The lack of interoperability in systems and services, such as electronic health records, patient summaries and emergency data sets, has been identified as a major obstacle towards the widespread take-up of eHealth applications in the EU. The development of interoperable healthcare systems across the EU 27 was defined as one of the main priorities in the bloc’s eHealth action plan up to 2010. A draft Recommendation on eHealth Interoperability was submitted for informal public consultation in July 2007.
Commission Recommendation
Following the 2007 stakeholder consultation on the issue, the Commission Recommendation was adopted on 2 July 2008 and outlines the steps that Member States should take to establish an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system compatible with those in other Member States. EHRs are records of a patient’s health information on, for example, past medical history, treatment progress, medications or laboratory data. As patients become more mobile within Europe, EHRs that are readable by health professionals in different settings and languages would enable both safer treatments and reduce the overall cost of health care.
A key objective of the recommendation, according to the Commission, is "to allow patients to choose to access his/her important information stored in electronic health record systems anywhere at any time".
It invites Member States to undertake action at:
The overall political level to set up the necessary regulatory and financial environment to make eHealth infrastructure and services interoperable;
the organisational level to create, for example, a common domain accompanied by the necessary interfaces that enable the national domains to interact;
the technical level to promote use of technical standards and to establish common interoperability platforms;
the semantic level to agree on common priorities and specific applications, and;
the level of education and awareness raising to monitor and consider all intended and related developments.
The recommendation will be implemented by the Smart Open Services project (S.O.S.), also launched on 2 July.
The project is a three-year €22 million joint initiative by the Commission and 12 Member States and their industry players to demonstrate the benefits of interoperable EHR and electronic prescriptions. The stated aim is "to remove linguistic, administrative and technical barriers within the EU" by making essential information on the medical and medication history of a patient available for a doctors treating the patient far from home.
Next steps
The results of SOS project will be disseminated to the wider European healthcare community via the CALLIOPE network (Call for Interoperable eHealth services in Europe) to enable other member states to join the exercise.
