The Standards and Interoperability Office participates in Interhealth 2018 in Italy

Between September 17 and 21, Ariadna Rius and David Rodríguez, of the Fundació TIC Salut Social’s Office of Standards and Interoperability attended Interhealth2018, organized by CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia) which took place in Pula (Sardinia). This year’s edition consisted of the week-long course Scientific School Interoperability in Healthcare: standards, guidelines and challenges, an introduction to the major healthcare ICT standards by combining theoretical concepts with practical activities and a final practice at the end. The course placed the emphasis on the importance of healthcare interoperability, in terms of clinical workflows and the quality of patient care, while also investigating the more technical aspects of the integration of Healthcare Information Systems.

Specifically, the training agenda included the presentation of the HL7 v2, v3, CDA and FHIR standards; IHE guides and profiles; the communication protocol for electrocardiograms EN 1064 SCP-ECG v3.0; and the modelling of electronic health records with OpenEHR. The course also dealt with the various tools which enable the adoption and implementation of standards, such as ART-DECOR, Mirth Connect and Gazelle; there were also two sessions on semantic interoperability: the first covered the FHIR resources which facilitate working with terminologies such as SNOMED CT and LOINC; and the second dealt with the implementation of the HL7 CTS2 standard.

The final session on the course was a simulation of a small scale “Connectathon”, which involved demonstrations of how to adopt standards by simulating use cases in real-life situations. In this practical exercise, the participants were taught how to use the tools and techniques covered during the course, to build and test a module which complies with the standards that had previously been introduced, with regard to a specific health domain.

The course was attended by speakers from different members of HL7 Italy, HL7 Germany and IHE, as well as staff from CRS4 and the University of Cagliari.