A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for the HL7 Europe Working Group Meeting and EU-a-thon in Lisbon, Portugal! We had a record-breaking number of attendees. We’ll keep the momentum going and drive positive change towards interoperability and enhanced patient care in Europe.
This is the report about the meeting with key results, pictures and video impressions.
Hospital on FHIR Satellite Event
On Monday February 10, the Hosptial on FHIR initiative started the week with a satellite event. There is an additional report on this meeting here.
Technical Coordination Team (TNT)
The Technical Coordination Team (TNT) also met on Monday morning, approved a new roster, a revised Decision-Making Process (DMP) and the harmonized HL7 Europe FHIR Implementation Guide (IG) general structure. A Task Force was established work on HL7-FHIR Community processes and finally, discussions were initiated on community-based HL7 FHIR IG publication.
Opening
The Opening session on Tuesday morning held in the JJ Laginha auditorium at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Iscte) started with Diego Kaminker’s keynote on Accelerating HL7 FHIR Adoption – Global Trends (presentation).
The Deputy Chief Standards Implementation Officer of HL7 International highlighted FHIR Global International Guides and FHIR Regional Implementation and invited the audience on a journey around the world.
Rutt Lindström talked about HL7 FHIR for the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and brought valuable insights to the audience about the EHDS Priorities, HL7 FHIR and the relationship of the European and national implementation guides, their status and timelines.
Catherine Chronaki, Secretary General of HL7 Europe, honored the incoming and outgoing HL7 Europe Board of Director members. An additional special report can be found under HL7 Europe celebrates eight interoperability pioneers.
Giorgio Cangioli reported about the PHOENIX European Cancer Initiative. PHOENIX stands for Patient Health Oncological Expertise Network for International Exchange and strives to create an aligned common (European) cancer data model, agnostic to the type of cancer and usable across different use cases.
Finally, Kai Heitmann from HL7 Europe and János Vincze, vendor co-chair of IHE Europe, outlined the HL7 EU-a-thon’s scope, goals, and further developments into the IHE Connect-a-thon world. They emphasized the new HL7 Europe and IHE Europe collaboration to foster consistency and maturity of specifications and better products, as well as the opportunity to all interested parties and stakeholders to gain more professional maturity and knowledge about the specification and testing continuum of both organizations towards an interoperable EHDS.
The Opening presentations (with the exception of Diego’s one) can be downloaded here.
EU-a-thon and Working Group sessions
The EU-a-thon and subsequent Working Group Sessions focused on the Hospital Discharge Report (HDR), the European Patient Summary (EPS), and the Base and Core FHIR Profiles for Europe, with excellent attendance and productive sessions.
A partnership with LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes, Regenstrief) has been established to tackle terminology challenges. Furthermore, a significant number of open issues were resolved, with more to be addressed soon. Stay tuned to visit our meeting calendar at hl7europe.org.
The Imaging Study Report track discussed the current nascent implementation guide (IG) and worked on aspects to finalize the IG in preparation of the HL7 International Working Group meeting in May in Madrid and the IHE Connect-a-thon in Vienna in June this year.
The Medication Prescription and Dispense track had passionate and goal-oriented discussion for the corresponding IG, which is an HL7 and IHE collaboration.
HL7 Europe Laboratory Report track had presentations on national FHIR-based lab report, harmonization of national CDA-based lab reports with EEHRxF. Sebastian Bojanowski, one of the track leads talked about the Polish experiences.
Other track lead Kai Heitmann talked about visualization of Laboratory Reports and other HL7 Europe FHIR resource instances with utilizing the vi7eti project. Coming from the European Gravitate Health and the xShare project it shows cross-project effects.
A discussion was started and is definitely found to be continued related to human readable text in FHIR resource instances for the Laboratory Report, but also in general.
Finally, generating realistic synthetic data with SYNDERAI was a topic. Kai described the project that primarily focused on the Lab Report but will soon be extended to produce lots of realistic example data for the Hospital Discharge Report, European and International Patient Summary, and others.
Some educational sessions throughout the week completed the meeting.
Even during the two receptions and the breaks that were hold at Iscte with drinks and a good catch of Portuguese food didn’t stop the discussions about future interoperability challenges.
Common Cancer Model
The Common Cancer Model track drew strong attendance, with over 34 participants across its five sessions. The group was diverse, including clinicians and researchers, as well as technical experts in areas like FHIR, OMOP and data modeling. International representation was broad, with attendees from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Slovenia, the UK, Greece, and the Czech Republic. This demonstrates the high level of interest and support for this innovative project: developing a common cancer data model for Europe, suitable for both primary and secondary use of data. Key results included the creation of a conceptual model and the identification of key entities.
Next steps are to finalize the conceptual model and move to logical model to present at the HL7 International meeting in Madrid.
European Specifications – nationally implemented
The Thursday started with a well-attended session about European Specifications – nationally implemented exposing experiences, bottlenecks, challenges and lessons learned. Roman Radomski gave an introduction and along with Daniel Karlson and Kai Heitmann a round trip through several European Affiliate countries was started that showed the approaches and potentials for collaboration. We had reports from
- Poland,
- Sweden,
- Austria,
- Netherlands,
- Norway,
- Slovakia,
- Germany,
- Finland,
- Estonia,
- Czech Republic and
- Belgium.
Non-technical insights about EHDS regulations and the role of HL7 by Michał Czarnuch and further discussions led to the conclusion that a series of online meetings needs to be planned for the next weeks and months that shall continue the topic-oriented discussions.
Closing
The Closing ceremony was highlighting all key achievements of the week. During the week also three video testimonials were recorded with a good reflection of the week and suggestions for the next meetings.
The suggestion to complete the meeting survey, a short picture show from the event, statements about virtual continuation sessions for various topics/tracks and planned future HL7 Europe Working Group Meetings as well as other HL7 events in Europe and the world concluded the successful week in mostly sunny Lisbon.
Track Lead’s and Speaker’s Retrospectives
Please also listen to some short HL7 Europe WGM retrospectives by some of our track leads and speakers.
Thanks
A big thank you to EUa-thon and Working Group Session Track Leaders for their engagement: Giorgio Cangioli, Rutt Lindström, José Costa Teixeira, Roberta Gazzarata, Bas van den Heuvel, Roman Radomski, Sebastian Bojanowski, Clotaire Delanchy, Daniel Karlson, Nenad Živković and Kai Heitmann as well as and our educational speakers Nikolai Ryzhikov, Ward Weistra and René Spronk. And of course, thanks to all participants who turned this week into a time of exchange of experiences and fruitful results.
A special thank must go to the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Iscte) who hosted this event making the meeting a resounding success! Finally, we owe our gratitude to HL7 Portugal, chair João Aleida, vice-chair Joana Cunha and board members. Their support was crucial to this event.
Muito obrigado e até breve
Text: Rhonda Facile, Kai Heitmann
Photos: participants, private, Hospital on FHIR @ UpHill: Rui Valido
Videos: Kai Heitmann, Fanch Rouault
