e-Health and health care systems (E-HEALTH)

Launch of specific actions, under the agreement/collaboration with the Agency for Digital Italy, finalized to: i) design and validation of ICT platforms for the interoperability of health critical systems in compliance with the current regulations, especially on Electronic Health Record (EHR); ii) standardization of the structure of clinical documents and the use of terminological systems for coding the clinical content appropriately. As far as the development of the EHR national system is concerned: i) modelling of health business processes; ii) definition of access control and information integrity mechanisms (cybersecurity); iii) development of technical specifications and health informatics standards; iv) implementation of testing environments. One of the main priorities of European governments is to make health systems easily accessible, interoperable, secure and trusted, especially with respect to health information and personal data. Indeed, the integration of the large amounts of valuable health data, generated and collected during citizens' medical examinations in different clinical settings, offers enormous possibilities of reuse for research and better care purposes. To this aim, several national and European ICT systems have been realized to support exchange and analysis of huge amount of health data produced daily by clinical organizations, employing health standards, coding systems and medical terminologies. However, the partial and often trivial adherence of native data, typically stored in silos, to syntactic and semantic standards, as well as the heterogeneity of health processes and security measures, represent open and challenging problems not solved yet. CNR participates to the EHR National Board, under which the EHR national interoperability framework has been defined and implemented by all the Italian Regions. Other activities are: development of coding support web services, based on formal rules; integrated terminology services based on standard semantic interoperability protocols to support the stakeholders in the terminology management and use; optimization of document management and preservation processes within healthcare facilities, including the analysis on conformity to standard specifications; alignment and improvement of models to measure the quality management level of hospitals and highlight best practices; documentation and annotation of patients' data and integration of different exams/data/information to be shared among different specialists.