Health informatics — International patient summary

This document defines the core data set for a patient summary document that supports continuity of care for a person and coordination of their healthcare. It is specifically aimed at supporting the use case’ scenario for ‘unplanned, cross border care’ and is intended to be an international patient summary (IPS). Whilst the data set is minimal and non-exhaustive, it provides a robust, well-defined core set of data items. The tight focus on this use case also enables the IPS to be used in planned care. This means that both unplanned and planned care can be supported by this data set within local and national contexts, thereby increasing its utility and value.

It uses the European Guideline from the eHN as the initial source for the patient summary requirements, then takes into consideration other international patient summary projects to provide an interoperable data set specification that has global application.

This document provides an abstract definition of a Patient Summary from which derived models are implementable. Due to its nature therefore, readers should be aware that the compliance with this document does not imply automatic technical interoperability; this result, enabled by this document, can be reached with the conformity to standards indicated in the associated technical specification and implementation guides.