European Commission - DG SANTE (B3, A4), CNECT (H3), DIGIT

Chair and co-chairs of eHMSEG

• Operations Community
• Semantic Community
• Technical Community (OpenNCP)

Regulation on Data Protection

The eHDSI starts with the Heath Care Professional of Country of Treatment (Country B, where the unplanned health care event occurred) asking for relevant health data of the patient, from patient's Country of Affiliation (Country A).

From technical point of view, the request goes from the NCPeH Gateway of Country B to the NCPeH Gateway of Country A. The requested information is retrieved from Country A National Infrastructure, sent back and presented to the Health Care Professional in Country B. On the diagram, this flow is represented with blue arrows (the request for information flow) and red arrows (the retrieved information flow).

Country A will retrieve patient's health data from the National Infrastructure systems and aggregate this data into the Patient Summary and ePrescription documents.

An ePrescription means a medicinal prescription issued and transmitted electronically.

A Patient Summary is an identifiable data set of essential and understandable health information needed to assure Health Care Coordination and the continuity of care.

The Member States are fully responsible to obtain and aggregate this data, as it is contained within their national systems. Also, the Member States are fully responsible to obtain the agreement of the patient for transferring and processing his/her personal data.

Using the Local Terminology Repository from the National Infrastructure, the Patient Summary and ePrescription are translated in English and transcoded (the health data is transformed from the national code system to the commonly agreed code system).

The Member States are fully responsible for exchanging and processing (translate and transcode) the Patient Summary and ePrescription documents. Therefore, the implementation, operation and maintenance of the NCPeH Gateway are under their responsibility and connect to their National Infrastructure.

eHDSI Solution Provider develops a reference implementation of the NCPeH Gateway. This is an open source implementation to be further used by the Member States.

The Network part is comprised by the TESTAng (TESTA new generation) private network and the TAP (TESTA Access Points) connectors. The TESTAng solution is established under the responsibility of DIGIT. The TESTA Access Points are installed in Member States premises and are managed under their responsibility. The Member States use TESTAng for two purposes:

• To retrieve from the eHDSI Central Service (point 1f. below) the necessary configuration files for the proper operations of the NCPeH Gateway and Terminology services.
• As a channel to transfer the ePrescription and Patient Summary in a secure way between the Member States.

This part of the network ensures encrypted secure transmission of ePrescription and the Patient Summaries. The TESTAng is only a technical mean for transmission and the data are not processed or stored.

• Configuration Server (CS): eHDSI Solution Provider (DG SANTE, Unit A4) is responsible for the deployment and maintenance of the Core Service (software development is performed by DG DIGIT). The CS is used by each NCPeH gateway to publish and store technical details, configuration information including the Domain Name System (DNS), Certificates, end points, International Patient Search Mask etc.
• Central Terminology Server (CTS): eHDSI Solution Provider (DG SANTE, Unit A4) is responsible for the development, deployment and maintenance of this Core Service. The CTS is used to store code systems and the Member States translations/mappings of the medical terms.