Projectathon 2021 - in the Sign of HL7 FHIR Exchange Formats - CISTEC

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Projectathon 2021 – in the Sign of HL7 FHIR Exchange Formats

Imagine you, as a patient, suffer from a medication allergy, e.g. to penicillins or radiological contrast agents, and because this information was not recorded in a structured way either by your general practitioner or in your hospital, you are mistakenly given such a medication in the emergency department with unwanted side effects, which can range from skin rash and itching, hives and in severe cases to shortness of breath, consciousness disorders and even circulatory arrest. We at CISTEC believe that such problems should be avoidable nowadays. This is also the declared goal of a new allergy exchange format, for which we have been strongly committed this year. As with medication data, structured allergy data should also be exchangeable between healthcare facilities and primary systems, such as KISIM, should be able to reliably warn against such dangers.

New exchange formats could be tested this year, including the new HL7 FHIR CH-Allergy&Intolerance exchange format, which was developed by CISTEC on behalf of eHealth Suisse. Others in our focus were CH ORF (Orders and Referrals by Forms) and its derivatives such as CH eTOC (referral forms, e-referral), CH LAB-Order (laboratory registration), CH RAD-Order (radiology registration).

This is now the fifth consecutive year that CISTEC has participated in the Projectathon in Bern. Finally, this year some core communities have managed to achieve certification and some have even started the productive operation of the Swiss EPD (electronic patient record). CISTEC has also been able to make a significant contribution here and our solutions can now prove themselves in practice. Thus, for many of our customers, the EPD operation is likely to start in the coming year 2022. We are happy to support you in this.

Often, discussions about exchange scenarios continued with other companies even after working hours.

But as mentioned at the beginning, more structured data in the EPD is necessary to bring real benefits for patients and healthcare professionals. Here we are at the forefront with the current FHIR profiles:

• Medication and allergies should be exchangeable in such a way that they are directly integrated into the medication components (chart) and allergy recording (CAVE) and thus enable various medication checks (e.g. duplicate, interaction, allergy warnings) in the interest of patient safety.
• Other closely related use cases concern the exchange of nationwide standardised forms so that they can be displayed and filled in directly in other information systems, instead of each hospital creating 50 or more proprietary registration forms. For this purpose, CISTEC is involved in the context of eTransition of Care with KISIM with a prototype from Axsana HealthLink (basic referral). (Image from KISIM).

The CISTEC team at work at Projectathon 2021 in Bern (from left to right Walter Wellauer, Andreas Gebert, Marco Studer and Robert Birri)

It has once again been shown that the joint concentrated work of various companies on the same topic enables very good progress. In September 2022, CISTEC will probably participate again to be at the forefront on the topic of structured data exchange with HL7 FHIR.

Do you have comments or questions about this blog post? Write us an email at moc.cetsic@ofni, we look forward to hearing from you.

Blog author: Daniel Ratschiller, Product Manager CISTEC AG