Health Information Technical standards

Safe, reliable healthcare depends on access to, and the use of, information that is accurate, valid, reliable, timely, relevant, legible and complete.

We are developing Health Information Technical Standards to ensure that there can be consistency in capturing and sharing of health information records.

What are Health Information Technical Standards?

Health Information Technical Standards support interoperability between systems and meaningful sharing of data.  These include data definitions, clinical concepts and terminologies, coding and classifications, messaging specifications, the Electronic Health Record, and security.

Health information standards are intended to remove ambiguity and ensure that there can be mutual understanding. Common data definitions are required in order to support the collection of nationally consistent and comparable data on the health status of the community, health determinants and health services (including performance).

Why introduce Technical Standards for health information?

The ability to share health information is fundamental to the development of a timely, comprehensive, coordinated and above all safe healthcare system.

Best practice recommends using international standards with limited national customisation. This applies equally to standards for key performance indicators and minimum data sets as well as for messaging and electronic healthcare records standards.

It is important to ensure coherence across all the different standards and to promote information re-use, i.e. create information once and use many times.

What is being done?

We developed the General Practice Messaging Standard in March 2010 and a revised version was published in November 2011. This defines the structure and content of electronic messages used in the transfer of information to and from general practices and acute care and out of hours care. The standard is a local customisation of the international messaging standard developed by the Health Level Seven (HL7) organisation, an international standards development agency specialising in messaging standards for healthcare.

The scope of this messaging standard includes messages to:

  • notify GPs of a patient’s attendance at an Emergency Department
  • notify GPs of a patient’s admission to or discharge from hospital
  • allow GPs to make electronic referral to hospital consultants
  • allow GPs to order laboratory test and receive the results
  • carry discharge summaries from hospitals and out of hours care back to the patients GP in a timely manner
  • inform GPs of hospital appointment for their patients.

The next area we will focus on is terminologies for coding of laboratory and radiology tests. Existing international standards will be identified and assessed for suitability.

Front cover of the General Practice Messaging Standard 2.0 document

We are working with an external group to develop standards for Laboratory Orders for Ireland using the LOINC standard.

The Authority is working with stakeholders to define a prioritised list of areas where we will develop eHealth Interoperability Standards. We undertook a public consultation process between December 2011 and January 2012 where we received valuable feedback from a broad range of stakeholders and we have formed an Advisory Group to advise us on where we should prioritize our efforts. We are commencing work on developing standards to support Electronic Prescribing.