News & Opinions

Report on ARGOS eHealth Pilot Project

Contributed by Prof Dipak Kalra (Director of Research) and Prof Georges de Moor (President), the EuroRec Institute

The ARGOS eHealth Pilot Project is a funded collaboration between AMIA and a consortium of European organizations led by the EuroRec Institute. The two-pronged ARGOS goal is to support the establishment of a Transatlantic Observatory through which to meet global health policy challenges using ICT-enabled solutions and to develop and promote common methods for responding to global eHealth challenges in the EU and the U.S.

The EU and the U.S. care about the global challenges because:

(a) citizens travel and migrate globally and there is a wish to foster good health care everywhere;
(b) the EU and U.S. wish to refine their products to better penetrate global markets; and
(c) experiences and lessons learned globally are useful in Europe and the U.S.

The Observatory will promote mutual understanding and learning among EU and U.S. policy researchers and policy-makers on the following challenges of global dimension:

1. Improving health and well-being of citizens through accelerating eHealth strategy development and through supporting large-scale eHealth infrastructure implementations;
2. Supporting R&D in eHealth to promote benefits following the pursuit of consistent strategies.

At their recent meeting in Washington, which coincided with AMIAS’s Annual Symposium, more than 70 experts from both sides of the Atlantic discussed key topics of mutual concern, including quality assurance and certification of EHR systems, consistent and interoperable clinical meaning between systems (semantic interoperability), health informatics professionalism and practitioner accreditation, and advanced physiological (predictive) modeling.

With regards to EHR system certification, there is a strong wish to align globally on user requirements and quality criteria against which EHR systems should be evaluated, although it was recognised that official specifications for different kinds of systems used in different care settings might still need to be defined and certified country by country to align with national reimbursement policies. The EuroRec repository of EHR quality criteria, comprising over 1,500 fine-grained statements assembled into nearly 200 requirements and translated into 19 languages, was recognised to be a valuable starting point for this collaboration.

Delegates agreed on the importance of semantic interoperability to support improved patient care, especially to help improve safety and to manage complex multi-disease pathways, and to enable the discovery of new knowledge. The challenge of harmonising clinical meaning and EHR documentation universally is daunting and might not even be desirable as not all clinical data need to be semantically processed. It is important to focus initially on mapping the record structures and terminology requirements for those conditions for which effective shared care and/or patient safety are concerns, and on which there already exists a strong clinical consensus on best practice. Initiatives need to consider the widest range of stakeholders, including clinicians and payers, patients and their networks, industry and academic research and their networks, public health and health service bodies.

A key output of ARGOS will be three Policy Briefs. They will concisely analyse and summarise project results on three topics:

• interoperability in eHealth and Certification of Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs);
• measuring adoption, usage and benefits of eHealth solutions;
• modeling and simulation of human physiology and diseases—Virtual Physiological Human (VPH);

Policy briefs will also provide recommendations for developing and aligning trans-Atlantic eHealth policy strategies and cooperation in the above fields, including setting concrete goals, proposing adoption measures, and processes to be followed.

Editor's note: Publication of these policy briefs will be covered in the next issue of The Standards Standard.

This project is funded by the European Union within the framework of the Pilot Project on Transatlantic Methods for Handling Global Challenges in the European Union and the United States. The general objective of the Pilot Project, created through a European Parliament initiative, is to promote mutual understanding and learning among EU and US policy researchers and policymakers on a number of challenges with a global dimension.