Last week, at the HiMSS Health 2.0 Europe Conference the winners of the Trillium II Prize have been announced. They were selected by an international and independent jury from a list of nine finalists from Europe, Canada and South America.
Two initiatives that reflect the transformative power of the International Patient Summary (IPS) in health and care were selected, showing how standards can serve as infrastructure to innovation both incremental building on existing solutions, and disruptive challenging the status quo:
- Trifork (Denmark), which proposes to extend the operational Danish Shared Medication Record service, funded by the Danish Health Data Authority to provide Danish citizens with their patient summary information when abroad.
- CAPABLE (Norway), which aims to provide citizens a tool to empower citizens to active use of personal health information in the IPS to make healthy nutritional choices being mindful of food and medication combinations.
While Trifork is an infrastructure driven project to facilitate safe care, CAPABLE is very much an empowerment tool, for the citizens to be in control of their health and wellness. What is common to both projects in the need for health data that are provided through stable, safe, and trusted interfaces.
The Trillium II project launched in 2019 the Prize Award competition to advance awareness and innovative use of the HL7 FHIR International Patient Summary (IPS) among health companies and organizations. IPS standards advance the vision of the patient summary as a window to a person’s health information and highlight the value of health data as social good and human right. Consistently adapted and tailored to specific use cases, IPS standards implemented in electronic clinical documents in the HL7 FHIR format or as collection of FHIR resources from a library of building blocks. Reusable building block for allergies, medication, problems and conditions, lab results, and images, care plans, etc. are rapidly emerging to advance health data quality, safety, and trust delivering interoperability anytime and anywhere. Implementations of the IPS building blocks are already advancing proof of concept implementations of the Electronic Health Record Exchange Format recommendation announced by the European Commission in February 2019.
The winners of the Trillium II Prize Competition realized early the importance of the IPS building blocks. In 2007, the Danish Health Data Authority set out to establish a nationwide Shared Medication Record, containing up-to-date information on every citizen in Denmark and shared across all local systems in the healthcare sector. Trifork was selected as vendor and has been part of building, tuning, expanding and driving the system since the beginning. Introducing IPS is a natural next step to the range of national services in the Danish healthcare infrastructure. Using existing well-established services such as the Shared Medication Record eases the transition for existing systems towards a national support for IPS in Denmark and makes it safer to cross borders for both Danes as well as international citizens and still being able to receive the correct medical care in case needed.
For more information on Trifork, please contact: jvi@trifork.com
CAPABLE on the other hand aims to empower citizens to active use of their health information and University of Oslo, Akerhus University Hospital, and Norsk E-helse AS are part of the project. The vision for CAPABLE is to support every citizen who want to collect, curate and/or complement, and control personal health information. The content suggested in the IPS is an excellent starting point to include data like ePrescription, medication list and nformation leaflets, appointments and clinical summary, and special diet and nutritional requirements. This can drive innovation by allowing for and supporting citizens in efforts to collect, manage and safely keep clinical and personal health information, starting with a) better use of medication, b) understand the role of nutrition for health, especially related to medication, c) coordinate data from primary care, hospitals and other relevant sources. The “CAPABLE-tool” will be available to citizens, to be used as they like at all points of need.
Citizen can be the courier of their health information usint the “CAPABLE-tool” in all interactions with the health and care systemP a visit to a specialty clinic, hospitalization in Norway, Scandinavia as well as abroad (cross-border), in consultation with GP or Primary care institutions (nursing home or a skilled care facility), or in private clinics. Making citizens as aware of benefits in carefully selected health information in the IPS with the “CAPABLE-tool”, comes with concrete opportunities and potential to improve digital health literacy, empower and engage us all, and use our resources wisely to improve the quality of life and overall wellbeing. When fully deployed, we expect the “CAPABLE-tool” to impact health and care in multiple ways and by “let citizens help there is potential to create significant value for the citizen, the health system and society. For example, in Norway alone, lack of compliance in medication management is estimated to cause some 2000 premature deaths every year, and direct costs of 5 billion NOK per year. A recent cost-benefit analysis suggests that prevention and treatment of nutritional problems may contribute to 800 million NOK in reduced hospital costs, and additional reductions in primary care.
For more information on CAPABLE, please contact: anne.moen@medisin.uio.no
Stay tuned to find out the next steps after the end of Trillium II project, follow project’s website and Twitter account!
ECHAlliance is proud partner of the Trillium II project in which frame we have delivered a study on the current use of IPS standards in innovative public procurements schemes and contributed to design a business model for IPS standards’ adoption in mHealth apps that will be both published soon.
