The International Patient Summary: Proposal for a National Implementation for Cyprus

This paper describes a proposal for a national implementation for creating a platform for exchanging health data within Cyprus and between Cyprus and other countries. The implementation is based on combining both the International Patient Summary guidelines, as well as the European guidelines for meeting the requirements of using the minimum dataset that needs to be communicated between different systems and countries, together with the respective value sets and rules. The latter consists of the Patient Summary which was defined by the European eHealth Network as the most important relevant information needed by a health professional to perform medicine. Examples of this information are the allergies, or medication, or major health problems of a patient. To achieve interoperability, a state-of-the-art protocol called “Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources” is used. The task is being developed under the “eHealth4U” national funded project and is aligned with the national eHealth law. Further on that, a solution evaluation is presented.