BS EN 13606-1 is a European standard that aims to define a rigorous and stable information architecture for communicating part or all of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) of a single subject of care (patient). This is to support the interoperability of systems and components that need to communicate (access, transfer, add or modify) EHR data via electronic messages or as distributed objects:
- Preserving the original clinical meaning intended by the author
- Reflecting the confidentiality of that data as intended by the author and patient.
It may also be used for EHR communication between an EHR system or repository and clinical applications or middleware components (such as decision support components) that need to access or provide EHR data.
BS EN 13606-1 considers the EHR to be the persistent longitudinal and potentially multi-enterprise or multi-national record of health and care provision relating to a single subject of care (the patient), created and stored in one or more physical systems in order to inform the subject’s future health care and to provide a medico-legal record of care that has been provided. Whilst an EHR service or system will need to interact with many other services or systems providing terminology, medical knowledge, guidelines, workflow, security, persons registries, billing etc. this European Standard has only touched on those areas if some persistent trace of such interactions is required in the EHR itself, and requires specific features in the reference model to allow their communication.
BS EN 13606-1 will predominantly be used to support the direct care given to identifiable individuals, or to support population monitoring systems such as disease registries and public health surveillance. Uses of health records for other purposes such as teaching, clinical audit, administration and reporting, service management, research and epidemiology, which often require anonymisation or aggregation of individual records, are not the focus of this European Standard but such secondary uses might also find the standard useful.
Contents of BS EN 13606-1:2007:
Scope
Normative references
Terms and definitions
Abbreviations
Conformance (normative)
EHR System conformance
Member State conformance
Reference Model
Index to Packages
Package: EXTRACT Package
Package: DEMOGRAPHICS Package
Package: SUPPORT Package
Primitive Data Types
UML profile
Relationship to other standards
Clinical Example
Mapping to statements of requirement
Bibliography
Part 1 of BS EN 13606 of the multipart series is an ‘information viewpoint’ specification as defined by the Open Distributed Processing – Reference model: Overview (ISO/IEC 10746-1). BS EN 13606-1 is not intended to specify the internal architecture or database design of Electronic Health Record systems.
BS EN 13606 may offer a practical and useful contribution to the design of EHR systems but will primarily be realised as a common set of external interfaces or messages built on otherwise heterogeneous clinical systems.
BS EN 13606-1 is not intended to specify the internal architecture or database design of Electronic Health Record systems or components. Nor is it intended to prescribe the kinds of clinical applications that might request or contribute EHR data in particular settings, domains or specialities. For this reason, the information model proposed here is called the EHR Extract, and might be used to define a message, an XML document or schema, or an object interface. The information model in this European Standard is an ISO RM-ODP Information Viewpoint of the EHR Extract.