First attended workshops of the RACSEL project

In October, Costa Rica and Peru hosted the four attended workshops of the RACSEL (American Network of Cooperation on Electronic Health) project. This initiative is intended to define the legal framework, the standards and the reference architecture for the implementation of the Electronic Shared Medical Record (HCE), focusing on sharing information between the regions of Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Costa Rica.

Fundació TicSalut is taking part in this definition by leading the components of the legal framework, the technical and semantic standards (terminology) under the coordination of the IN2 company. RACSEL is conceived as a consultancy project based on collaboration, dialogue and the exchange of knowledge and experiences on the interoperable Electronic Shared Medical Record.

On 11 and 12 October, the workshop on the component of the legal and regulatory framework was held in Costa Rica, and analysed each country’s situation. The terminology meeting was held on the two days following, 13th and 14th of October, and work was done on the reference framework defined and based on the SNOMED CT standard.

The sessions in Peru took place on 18-19 (standards component) and 20-21 (architecture) October. The first workshop dealt with the information exchange cases to be considered in the project, and related them to the different standards that can be used (HL7, HL7 CDA R2 messaging, IHE profiles, etc.). In the architecture component, an analysis was made of the technological proposal for sharing information between the different countries.

In the coming months, the gaps will be identified between the situation in each country and the defined reference model, and a series of recommendations will be drawn up to overcome them. The project will end in mid-February with an e-learning workshop for professionals from the different regions.

Ariadna Rius, of the Fundació TicSalut Office of Standards and Interoperability and responsible for the RACSEL terminology component stressed, “The first part of the RACSEL project consisted of defining a reference model based on national, European and international experiences. The attended workshops allowed us to finally understand the situation in each country with respect to each component, so we can readjust the initial model and identify the gaps in each one. RACSEL is an opportunity to repeat success cases in such different environments as those of the network: Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay and Chile.”