New report with recommendations for interoperability standards for clinical data management and medical imaging projects

The members of the Interoperability and Artificial Intelligence teams at the TIC Salut Social Foundation who are participating in the INCISIVE European project have led the production of a report with recommendations for any worldwide project or initiative seeking to operate with global interoperability standards in the health care sector. The document has been produced and published on behalf of the European consortium. It is also presents the project’s interoperability framework.

More than 25 universities, organisations and companies from all around Europe have been working on the INCISIVE project since 2020 with two main objectives. On the one hand, to establish a federated repository of cancer medical images and clinical data that allows secure data sharing in compliance with ethical, legal and privacy requirements. And on the other hand, to create an AI-based toolbox to improve detection though medical imaging and decision-making.

What is an interoperability framework?

As the European project explains in this article on the report, interoperability refers to the capacity of different systems, devices, or applications to exchange information without altering its meaning. Interoperability is crucial to resolve data integration issues between systems, mitigate data inconsistencies, and enable effective management of potential changes.

The interoperability framework is the document that resolves and defines the process followed in a project and provides a complete overview of the standardisation actions carried out. This includes analysis of the technical and functional prerequisites, the actors and transactions of each use case involving data use, justification of the chosen standards, the methodology and design carried out, interoperability risk analysis, the interoperability maintenance plan, publication and reuse of the implementation guides, and recommendations and future actions.

Sara Martínez-Alabart, the document’s principal author and an interoperability expert at the TIC Salut Social Foundation, commented that “for health information systems it is vital to consider (among other aspects) how to preserve the architecture, protect and secure the data, and authorise access, while maintaining the semantic meaning of clinical concepts when exchanging data between systems”.

Contribution to the European Health Data Space

The learnings and recommendations set out in the INCISIVE document, together with the contributions of the other projects that are part of the Artificial Intelligence for Health Imaging (AI4HI) cluster, are contributing to the design of the interoperability framework of the EUCAIM European project, which is building a pan-European federated cancer imaging infrastructure to drive innovations in artificial intelligence. This project is also expected to contribute to the interoperability framework of the European Health Data Space  (EHDS). 

More information and link to the report