Health Interoperability Forum in Barcelona with the collaboration of Fundació TicSalut

On 22 and 23 April, the Cibernàrium events hall in Barcelona hosted the fifth edition of the Health Interoperability Forum.  Organised by the Spanish Society of Health Informatics (SEIS), and with the support of Fundació TicSalut, Barcelona City Hall and the "red.es" program of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, the meetings were called to discuss the evolution of the regulations solving ever-evolving requirements.

In the state, the interoperability of the health system has acquired global dimensions: it is present both in the systems and in the organisations themselves and is now even beginning to exceed these limits and seek connections in other environments, such as social healthcare or secondary uses.  It is therefore obvious that in recent years there has been great change in this sense and the factor of interoperability is now of prime importance in the healthcare system.  Standardisation organisations are very aware of the new needs that are produced each day, and are therefore working on including them in the new regulations.

The new wave: applying experience to innovative challenges

Five sessions were held in this edition of the Health Interoperability Forum, which is held each year and which this year was called The new wave: applying experience to innovative challenges. The first referred precisely to the generation of regulations and specifically talked about the version of regulation 13606, of the new specification of the HL7 (FHIR) and also the developments in the ContSys standard.

The second session opened up discussion on new interoperability requirements and possible regulatory solutions. In order to offer a more realistic focus, the latest medical record projects of different organisations were presented.  The third session focused on developments in research and the different research groups had the chance to present the results of their most recent works.

The fourth session was the time to present the new commercial developments, in other words, it was a kind of shop window for sector companies to display their latest models of interoperability systems for organisations.  Finally, the fifth session, which took place just before the close, referred to the impact of the use of the CIE10 in public health systems, a session in which different administrations explained their development plans in this area.  Overall, the meetings were very useful for all agents involved in regulating the health sector and in the interoperability between the Information Systems and contributed to taking steps forward in achieving it.