Health Information Technical standards

Safe, reliable healthcare depends on access to, and the use of, information that is accurate, valid, reliable, timely, relevant, legible and complete.

We are developing Health Information Technical Standards to ensure that there can be consistency in capturing and sharing of health information records.

What are Health Information Technical Standards?

Health Information Technical Standards support interoperability between systems and meaningful sharing of data.  These include data definitions, clinical concepts and terminologies, coding and classifications, messaging specifications, the Electronic Health Record, and security.

Health information standards are intended to remove ambiguity and ensure that there can be mutual understanding. Common data definitions are required in order to support the collection of nationally consistent and comparable data on the health status of the community, health determinants and health services (including performance).

Why introduce Technical Standards for health information?

The ability to share health information is fundamental to the development of a timely, comprehensive, coordinated and above all safe healthcare system.

Best practice recommends using international standards with limited national customisation. This applies equally to standards for key performance indicators and minimum data sets as well as for messaging and electronic healthcare records standards.

It is important to ensure coherence across all the different standards and to promote information re-use, i.e. create information once and use many times.

What is being done?

EPrescribing and Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions

The Authority has conducted an international review of ePrescribing and Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (ETP). The purpose of this review is to document international experience with regard to ePrescribing and ETP between prescribers and dispensers. An initial desktop review identified six countries for further analysis. The countries were chosen based on initiatives identified in the desktop review and the availability of relevant information. Information was compiled from the documentation available from the countries in question.

The countries that are reviewed in detail in this report are Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. A short summary of the findings from the United States, Denmark and Sweden is also provided. A review of the ePrescribing element of the European eHealth Project (epSOS) is also included. The benefits of ePrescribing initiatives are well documented as an increasing number of countries adopt the use of ePrescribing in some form. These include a reduction in medication errors, prescription and transcription errors with a corresponding improvement in patient safety. The aim of this international review is to present the practices and processes adopted in other countries to develop national ETP solutions. Initiatives exist across these countries that could potentially inform the development of standards for ePrescribing in Ireland.
 

Guidance on Messaging Standards for Ireland

Arising out of the consultation undertaken on Developing National eHealth Interoperability Standards for Ireland: A Consultation Document a need for guidance documents was identified in three areas. These include terminology and classification standards, messaging standards and general interoperability standards, to ensure that information can be exchanged electronically in a safe and efficient way.

The purpose of this Guidance on Messaging Standards for Ireland, published in December 2012 is to provide high level guidance in respect of messaging standards in Ireland for the short to medium term.

This guidance was developed to inform key stakeholders, such as public and private service users, vendors, purchasers and implementers of health information systems, healthcare providers, the wider health informatics community and any other interested parties, about the proposed future direction of messaging standards in Ireland, and to encourage wider participation in standards development.

The guidance is targeted principally at those involved in specifying the requirements for and the development and implementation of new health information systems and eHealth applications, both locally and nationally.

General Practice Messaging Standard

We developed the General Practice Messaging Standard in March 2010 and a revised version was published in November 2011. This defines the structure and content of electronic messages used in the transfer of information to and from general practices and acute care and out of hours care. The standard is a local customisation of the international messaging standard developed by the Health Level Seven (HL7) organisation, an international standards development agency specialising in messaging standards for healthcare.

The scope of this messaging standard includes messages to:

• notify GPs of a patient’s attendance at an Emergency Department
• notify GPs of a patient’s admission to or discharge from hospital
• allow GPs to make electronic referral to hospital consultants
• allow GPs to order laboratory test and receive the results
• carry discharge summaries from hospitals and out of hours care back to the patients GP in a timely manner
• inform GPs of hospital appointment for their patients.

What other publications are planned?

Further publications will include guidance on terminology and classifications systems for Ireland, an awareness document on interoperability and health information standards, a dataset for clinical discharge summaries and technical standards to support the electronic transfer of prescriptions between prescriber and dispenser.