e-Sens project: Cross-border Patient Summary and ePrescription now one step closer to implementation

The e-Sens project partners took part in an event aiming to test how the newly-developed OpenNCP (open source reference implementation) tool was conforming to the technical specifications involved in cross-border exchange of patient summary and electronic prescription data. The testing took place during Lisbon eHealth Week (9th - 11th December 2015), at a special testing event organized by the EXPAND project, an EU initiative which aims at integrating relevant recommendations from previous EU eHealth project and establish sustainable pathway toward eHealth cross border services. The event was co-hosted by the Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE Europe), an association which brings healthcare vendors, clinicians and providers together to work on improving interoperability within European healthcare systems.

A large-scale test

Nine EU Member States (Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal and Switzerland) along with the European Commission's Directorate General for Health, DG SANTE, tested the latest version of the OpenNCP tool, an open source reference implementation which integrates three e-SENS building blocks: e-Identification (e-ID), Non-repudiation and Capability Lookup (BDX-SMP). ·

• The e-ID building block enables better identification of patients when they are seeking healthcare in a cooperating EU Member State, and also allows for more assurances on patient consent.
• The Non-repudiation generates and make available evidence concerning a claimed event or action in order to resolve disputes about the occurrence or non-occurrence of an event or action.
• The Capability Lookup building block will enable the European Commission's Directorate General for informatics (DG DIGIT) to host cross-domain central configuration services for National Contact Points for cross-border healthcare in other EU countries.

The Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology and the Agence eSanté participated together actively to the tests to prepare the Luxembourg for the future cross-border exchanges of patient summary and electronic prescription data. Representatives of DG DIGIT and DG SANTE participated actively in compliance monitoring. At this event, the testing was also observed by seven other countries (Bulgaria, France, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and United Kingdom).

2016 outlook

Next year,the eHealth domain of the e-SENS project will work on achieving higher levels of operation readiness, in technical terms, of the cross-domain building block and its integration with the reference implementation for a National Contact Point for eHealth (OpenNCP).