Patient Summaries and electronic prescriptions are two key services that support high quality healthcare. They provide healthcare professionals with basic information from the patient's medical and medication history. In many cases, a timely access to such information can save a patient's life (e.g. in case of a patient allergic to particular drugs; chronic diseases; etc.).
The international project epSOS was the first step towards the provision of important patient data for a physician in case of patients seeking unplanned medical treatment abroad.
The objectives of the epSOS project:
The aim of the project epSOS was to test a cross-border exchange of Patient Summaries and electronic prescriptions. During the pilot testing, the epSOS information infrastructure enabled the healthcare professionals an electronic access to patient data stored in the Patient Summary abroad and to foreign electronic prescriptions. The data were seen in the physician’s native language.
The epSOS project ended on June 30, 2014. Development and implementation activities in the project epSOS were attended by 23 States. Slovakia was represented in this project by the National Health Information Centre. One of the most important results of the pilot testing was the fact that Finnish citizens were able to pick up their medication in Swedish pharmacies while these electronic prescriptions were issued in Finland.
Great benefit of the project epSOS is an identification of the most serious problems that currently impede cross-border transfer of patient data in an electronic form. The most serious problems identified by the projects epSOS include differences in national laws and semantic interoperability.
The consolidation of epSOS results and their possible further use in building IT infrastructure enabling cross-border transmission of Patient Summaries and electronic prescriptions is currently processed by an international project Expand (
www.expandproject.eu).
The important information on the project are to be temporarily found at:
www.epsos.eu