Annual Project Progress Report

The epSOS project is targeted towards dealing with the problems that Health Care Professionals (HCP) and patients face when patients seek health care abroad. The project aims at enabling the use of electronic prescriptions, and, with the patient’s consent, communication of patient information beyond national borders. While a large number of Member States have progressed regarding the development of electronic patient information and ePrescriptions, the different national systems cannot always communicate with each other. epSOS aims to bridge the different national solutions and making it possible to communicate ePrescriptions and Patient Summaries across borders.

More precisely, epSOS will allow a patient to access ePrescription and Patient Summary services while abroad. The project builds on a bottom-up approach; following existing technical solutions and developing a set of specifications to ensure the interoperability of solutions, including security and identifications systems and performance criteria. In its first year, the project examined the maturity of existing solutions in the participating Member States, explored legal issues, and developed the necessary operational service requirements based on that analysis. A detailed survey comparing the national plans and solutions led to the conclusion that much activity is conducted within the Member States and in epSOS-relevant areas. With regard to cross-border Use Cases, the situation is less advanced, but if the pilot design is kept simple, the epSOS project will be effective.

The efforts in the Legal and Regulatory (L&R) analysis have led to the elaboration of about 100 L&R requirements that are essential for the design of epSOS components and services. These have different implications for the next phase and especially the work within the technical Work Packages, as they represent different levels of feasibility, and different types of activities are needed to address them. In terms of feasibility, the large majority of identified L&R requirements will be challenges for innovation and encapsulation in the epSOS specification (privacy by design) and the design specification of the Patient Summary and ePrescription services (safeguards-processes-provisions for audit). In addition to the L&R requirements, the project has achieved important progress in specifying the functional service requirements of the ePrescription and Patient Summary services, the final results of which will be available in the second year of epSOS. In both the ePrescription and Patient Summary related work, progress was made regarding the definition of a basic and extended interchangeable dataset. Regarding ePrescription, this basic set was defined as data items, which – from the pharmaceutical point of view – are to identify the medicine and to update the related prescription once the medicine has been dispensed. During the entire process, a set of issues and recommendations for other Work Packages has been identified, the most important of which concern the coding of the medication according to its active ingredient.

Work on the Patient Summary definition also progressed and defined the basic dataset as the essential health information that is required from the clinical point of view to be sent to deliver safe patient care both in unscheduled and planned encounters. Agreement was also reached that this data must be presented in a structured way, using currently available classification systems to support semantic interoperability services foreseen within the scope of epSOS.

In addition to these achievements on the content level, the project has also dynamically adjusted its project plan as a reaction to the information gathered, the lessons learned and the awareness of important interdependencies between specification and pilot implementation work. A detailed plan is now available, which is able to fulfil the remaining two years of the project. In the following phase the project will specify, test and validate the solutions, which will be followed by a 12-month Large Scale Pilot (LSP). In parallel to these activities, epSOS has also taken up negotiations with relevant stakeholders and established links between epSOS, CALLIOPE and STORK, regarding a project on eIdentification funded by the European Commission. A working group has been set up to align the effort in the general eGovernment/eID area and the specific eHealth requirements. The first steps in interchanging information have been taken and possible practical pilot goals are under discussion.

Together with the CALLIOPE Network a workgroup has been set up to enable interested European national ministries and their competence centres, which are not participating in epSOS, to learn about, and provide input to, epSOS developments. This type of a close involvement would prepare for a possible future direct involvement in the form of a pilot site connection to epSOS - if appropriate and agreed to by the epSOS consortium and the candidate associate state. It also allows key EU-stakeholders, members of CALLIOPE and not represented in the epSOS consortium - particularly those representing users such as health professional groups and patient organisations - to become actively and appropriately engaged. This would pertain especially to professional issues affecting the design of the epSOS system and its components.
Furthermore, it provides a platform for a validation of epSOS outputs within broader constituencies represented by the CALLIOPE Network. The aim is to establish a necessary level of trust that will make epSOS services practicable and to facilitate the integration of the epSOS experience into the work of the CALLIOPE Work Groups, especially regarding the elaboration of a European Interoperability Road Map and the review of the EC Interoperability Recommendation.