11. October 2006: "Update on ePrescribing in Europe: Moving from models and architectures to new services for patients"

How interoperable ePrescribing services – including informed prescribing, electronic transfer of prescriptions and medication records – can improve patient safety and healthcare efficiency across Europe and worldwide has been highlighted in this session through the presentations provided by the project and the representative of one of its State of the Art use cases (ZZZS, Slovenia). Thus the project synthesised "lessons learned" from a recent European ePrescribing conference jointly organised within the project framework by EHTEL, the Slovenian Government and the ZZZS (Slovenian Health Insurance Institute) in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.

Background: ePrescribing is a workflow application with an extremely high volume of transactions where considerable efficiency gains are to be expected. The support of processes like prescribing (incl. medication management) through ICTs is an element of many eHealth implementations throughout Europe. ePrescribing will be one of the first services directly available to consumers and patients and has a high potential for quality improvement e.g. by reducing medication errors. The presentations identified the state of play concerning interoperability issues in ePrescription and messaging and reflected in particular on the outcome of an workshop held in Ljubljana, June 2006. The workshop involved many stakeholders, in particular competence centres and health care authorities

• "ePrescribing and Medication Management: Interoperability for the ICT Supported Medication Workflow" (Presentation of WP4 of the i2-Health project ) by Stephan H. Schug, EHTEL, Brussels (i2-Health project partner).

• "Recording of Medication History – field experiences from pilot and national implementation in Slovenia" by Marjan Sušelj, Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia
  
• Improving healthcare and patient safety by interoperable ePrescribing services: Observations & Conclusions from the EHTEL International Conference ePrescribing & Medication Management, Ljubljana (Slovenia), 19-20 June 2006
  

12. October 2006:
"Interoperability of Identification Management in eHealth - Lessons Learned"

Background/Abstract: E-Health requires reliable identification and authentication of its participants. Previously - in the paper based era - this was delivered by a mixture of uncoordinated administrative measures, common sense and personal human interaction. With emerging eHealth applications this is going to change; all actors such as healthcare professionals and patients must be reliably identified. Specific requirements of data protection and privacy needs must match with undisturbed data flow to gain profit from IT in healthcare. The session focused on European identification interoperability in eHealth, i.e. that all services implemented in member states should work abroad as well as at home. The currently developed solutions in various member states  - primarily to enable the setting up of electronic patient records - are accompanied by a broad scope of identification philosophies. The session summarised the research conducted in the framework of the EU-funded project "I2-Health" and in particular the outcomes of an expert workshop entitled "Health-ID Management in Europe- one touchstone for interoperability" (Amsterdam, 2006).

Presentations on Health-ID management:

• "Interoperability Initiative for a European eHealth Area: Interoperability of ID Management - Introduction" by Dr. Karl A. Stroetmann, empirica Gesellschaft für Kommunikations- und Technologieforschung mbH, Bonn, Germany (i2-Health project partner).

• "Interoperability of Identification Management in eHealth" by Dr. Ramin Tavakolian, Zentralinstitut für die Kassenärztliche Versorgung, Berlin, Germany (i2-Health project subcontractor)

All presentations can be viewed/downloaded both by clicking on the presentation titles above and by selecting them in the "Attachments" section below.