Here’s the report from facilitator John D’Amore on the recent Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) mini connectathon on 6 October 2021 to demonstrate interoperability of the HL7® FHIR® International Patient Summary (IPS)
Our October event hosted over 30 attendees with active participation from 6+ GDHP nations. Some notable IPS demonstrations included:
- Exchange & Display : Patients First (NZ) & Patient Centric Solutions (US)
- Retrieve data from New Zealand server
- Displayed in personal health record
- Import, Export, Exchange & Display: Drimpy (NL) & Patients First (NZ)
- Demonstrate data retrieval from various data sources
- Display information in personal health record
- Attempt POST of bundle to New Zealand server
- Demonstrate import of IPS bundle from sample data
- Sample Validation: Dynamic Health IT (US), NHSx (UK), MITRE (US), Health Intersections (AU)
- Run sample IPS bundles through multiple validators
- Review errors. For 2 samples, majority of issues had proposed resolution during connectathon
- Import & Display : Interoperability Institute (US)
- Load sample IPS from previously available samples
- Open public API endpoints for attempted interaction with others
11 IPS samples were created during the event and updated in the public, online repository for IPS samples here: https://github.com/jddamore/IPSviewer/tree/main/samples/connectathon_samples While not all of these samples are fully validated yet, they represent an array of different technologies exporting FHIR data to create IPS documents. These samples can be loaded into a public viewer for IPS (https://www.ipsviewer.com/) hosted for the October 6th Mini-Connectathon. If you have additional samples you would like to add to the repository, please email johnd@moreinformatics.com (this email address) or make a Pull Request to the repository linked above.
During the discussion component of the connectathon, several topics were raised and actively discussed:
- Data filtering in IPS generation
- Optional data elements in the IPS
- How to deal with automatic generation of IPS
- How to incorporate patient generated data in IPS
- How to standardize QR codes and relation of IPS to SMART Health Cards (more info: https://smarthealth.cards/)
- Inclusion of local codes & terminology adoption in addition to SNOMED Global Patient Set (more info: https://www.snomed.org/snomed-international/learn-more/global-patient-set)
- The issues of language and language translation with IPS documents being shared cross-border
- Inclusion of text in addition to codable concepts (specifically whether fully specified names are recommended)
- Inclusion of human readable narrative
- Improvements that could be made to online and published FHIR validators
Several of the above and other IPS topics continue to be discussed online on chat.fhir.org (https://chat.fhir.org/#narrow/stream/207835-IPS). In addition, the weekly calls (Wednesdays 11am ET) for International Patient Summary are on the HL7 calendar and available to anyone who would like to attend (https://www.hl7.org/concalls/CallDetails.cfm?concall=57656 & https://confluence.hl7.org/display/PC/IPS+Project+Group+Meetings).