Development of an Interoperability Platform for Information Systems in the Ehealth Domain, for the Portuguese Health System

Abstract

EHealth has emerged as a new field at the intersection of medical informatics, public health and business, referring to healthcare services and information provided or enhanced through information technologies. Today, it is very focused on improving the interoperability between Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), and between them and the applications installed on patients' devices (smartphones and IoT), with the development of new platforms. Developments of this type imply the use of standards such as Health Level 7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (HL7 FHIR), openEHR, and Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), which guarantee that health data transmission policies are respected. The work presented in this article is developed within the framework of the Health for Portugal agenda (HfPT), of the "Agendas Mobilizadoras para a Inovação Empresarial" promoted by the "Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência portugês" (PRR), in collaboration with the Centro de Computação Gráfica (CCG/ZGDV), which is the organization responsible for development of this platform. This article is based on the initial phase of the development of a platform that allows the integration of different information systems, to solve the lack of interoperability of the EHRs of health stakeholders in Portugal and also to reduce the fragmentation of the HIS of the Portuguese SNS.