Joint Initiative Council for Global Health Informatics Standardization seeks stewardship for Intl Patient Summary

A subset of JIC members who originated the IPS Suite of standards looks to formalize a stewardship mechanism to take on its further development and management.

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA, June 20, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Joint Initiative Council on Global Health Informatics Standardization (JIC) is a collaboration of international digital health Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) that seeks to enable common, timely health informatics standards by addressing and resolving issues, gaps, overlaps, and counterproductive standardization efforts. From this group, a subset of members who originated the International Patient Summary (IPS) Suite of standards is looking to formalize a global IPS stewardship mechanism to take on its further development, maintenance and management.

WHAT IS THE IPS?

The IPS Suite is a unique set of standards that together enable the availability of pertinent personal health information at the point of care to ensure the safe and secure provision of healthcare. Developed to support patients needing (emergency) care outside of their home health system, it is intended to resolve the challenges posed when attending clinicians have little or no access to the patient’s previous health information. IPS stakeholders include patients and their families; healthcare professionals; healthcare providers (organizations); vendors, payer organizations (such as government or insurance companies); and government organizations.

The five SDOs currently co-managing the IPS standards are CEN/TC 251, HL7 International, IHE International, ISO/TC 215 and SNOMED International. Inspired by the diversity and cooperation among and between the many stakeholders that have contributed to the organic success of the IPS, the SDOs are driven by the overall will for the public good and the compelling needs that international patient summary use cases satisfy.

And with the Global Digital Health Partnership, the World Health Organization, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development identified as key stakeholders to further drive the adoption, use and future development of the IPS, the discussion paper also emphasizes the importance of integrating feedback from the broader patient, professional, and vendor communities to ensure the ongoing development and realization of the IPS.

THE ROLE OF GLOBAL IPS STEWARDS

As outlined in the JIC’s recently-released discussion paper, The Future of IPS as a Global Public Good, the concept of stewardship proposes how to manage needed actions such as extending the scope of the IPS to other use cases and decision making models to include other types of standards and specifications to meet the requirements of the live deployment of the IPS as deemed necessary. A prime objective of the JIC, this need is driven by the growing use of the IPS across and within nations, and by the increase in the number and diversity of stakeholders adopting, implementing and developing the IPS.

The discussion paper describes the collaborative process that has characterized the development of the IPS and highlights existing IPS resources, such as the IPS website. It notes the burgeoning use of the IPS not just across but within nations, and the tremendous increase in the number and diversity of stakeholders engaged in the adoption, implementation, and further development of the IPS.

The JIC’s goal, the paper explains, is to respond to the growing and evolving needs of the IPS while fostering effective coordination of the parties involved and ensuring that the IPS Suite can continue to effectively enable interoperability.

AN APPROACH FOR DISCUSSION

Rather than requiring a central authority, however, the paper calls for a more decentralized approach in which SDOs seek ways to be more responsive, reliable, and accountable in their coordinated efforts to incorporate new requirements and change requests in the IPS Suite as a whole.

JIC Chair, Dan Vreeman, states, “As an organization for whom collaboration with other organizations is a key pillar of its strategy, we understand that moving any standard forward requires a lot of input from a wide range of stakeholders,” he said. “The same is true for the advancement and adoption of the IPS – it will require input from all IPS stakeholder groups, including patients, healthcare professionals, healthcare provider organizations, vendors, payers, and government organizations. It’s truly impressive to see how far the IPS has come since it was envisioned, and by opening the door to the broader community, it can only improve and expand its current footprint.”

Part of the process of establishing a global stewardship will involve determining who can make specific decisions across the IPS lifecycle, such as making changes to the base standard, or who can define minimum requirements for alignment to the IPS that must be maintained without modification across local implementations of the IPS. At the same time, it will be important to take into account the impact all activities and decisions have across the entire IPS lifecycle while enabling sufficient local flexibility.

As envisioned, each of the stakeholder SDOs will retain full autonomy as it applies to their artifacts contributed to the IPS Suite, while committing to actively communicating, participating, and collaborating with the other organizations to ensure the IPS continues to develop as a truly global asset.

GLOBAL STEWARDSHIP REQUIREMENTS

Ensuring accountability across the global community will be an essential feature of effective stewardship of the IPS. As envisioned in the discussion paper, IPS stewardship will entail strategic oversight of processes that allow for bottom-up standards innovation and top-down standards alignment and propagation; the SDOs retain exclusive accountability for the standards and specifications that they have developed and which they maintain as part of the IPS Suite.

A Global IPS Stewardship group whose role is to take on the strategic and leadership role as outlined in the discussion paper would serve as a community of practice and strategically formulate assignments/expectations for participating organizations to carry out.

The JIC encourages stakeholders to review the linked discussion paper and welcomes your insights and feedback here. In addition to formally submitted written comments, the JIC also plans to convene subsequent virtual and/or in person sessions to discuss the future global stewardship of the IPS.


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Joint Initiative Council for Global Health Informatics Standardization
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Website: http://www.jointinitiativecouncil.org/discussion.papers.asp

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