e-Sens (Electronic Simple European Networked Services), a project initiated by the European Commission to develop the European Digital Market through technological solutions, today announced that the e-SENS Building Block (BB) 'Evidence Emitter' was tested for the first time at the end of April 2015.
The project was designed to act as a mechanism for achieving non-repudiation in cross-border communication between EU Member States, through the generation and collection of evidence, and was presented during the 15th European IHE-Connectathon Event, an annual connectivity test marathon. This year's event was held in Luxembourg by IHE-Europe in partnership with the Luxembourgish national e-Health agency, Agence eSanté, and was attended over the course of a week by 300 participants representing 74 vendors. e-SENS drew on the occasion to demonstrate to attendees the efficacy of the ‘Evidence Emitter’ BB by testing the integration into the OpenNCP software, which enables secure exchange of data between the National Contact Points (NCP) for cross-border healthcare.
The main objective of the e-SENS project is to ensure the interoperability of online health, business, procurement and justice functionalities through the use of cross-domain IT ‘building blocks’. ‘Evidence Emitter’ is one of the technical modules of the e-SENS European Interoperability Reference architecture, achieving Non-Repudiation in cross-border message exchange. The version of the ‘Evidence Emitter’ BB for the e-Health domain, tested at the Connectathon, is a modification of the IHE ATNA profile, which is now ready for Health IT Industry adoption and freely accessible online.
The e-Health domain of e-SENS is one of many piloting areas to be tested in the real life environment. Its objective is to enhance the cross border services started in the former Large Scale pilot epSOS, the aim of which was to provide access to Patient Summaries for citizens and electronic Prescriptions for health professionals across Europe. These two ‘use cases’ support the implementation of the Directive 2011/24 on the application of patients’ rights in cross-border healthcare . The Directive obliges also Member States to set up a NCP for cross-border healthcare.
The two use cases will be piloted by Luxembourg, Italy, Greece and Portugal, along with the Directorate General for Health and Food Safety of the European Commission, at the beginning of June in a preproduction environment to perform tests based on real conditions. In parallel, the central services of openNCP will be realigned with more generic standards with the integration of the e-Delivery BB 'service location and lookup capability’ to enable the European Commission to host cross domain central service. This update will enable sustainability of e-Health cross-border services through maintenance cost reduction of central services. The last BB planned to be integrated will enable health professionals to more efficiently identify electronically the patient to access his health document abroad.
Photo by e-SENS
