Interoperability and standards
Interoperability
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Identifying needs and defining how the reference standards should be adapted and adopted. -
Promoting the use of international reference standards (HL7 FHIR, SNOMED CT, LOINC, IHE, DICOM, OpenEHR, among others).
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Making clear, truthful and useful technical reference information available to the entire community.
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Providing recommendations and support to public and private bodies in the adoption of standards.
Services
SNOMED CT National Reference Center
The Interoperability and Technologies Area at the TIC Salut Social Foundation is the SNOMED CT National Reference Centre for the Department of Health of Catalonia. As such, it is the body responsible for maintaining and publishing the SNOMED CT Catalan Extension.
Find out more or request the SNOMED CT Catalan extension
National Reference Centre for OIDs
The Interoperability and Technologies Area at the TIC Salut Social Foundation is the National Reference Centre for OIDs for the Department of Health of Catalonia. As such, it is the body responsible for maintaining, managing and publishing the OIDs of the Department of Health of Catalonia.
Find out more or request the OID catalogue
Department of Health of Catalonia Catalogues
The Interoperability and Technologies Area at the TIC Salut Social Foundation is responsible for updating, maintaining and providing the catalogues, controlled vocabularies and subsets to the Department of Health of Catalonia through the Terminology Server and the Clinical Catalogues Tool of the Catalan Health System.
Find out more about the health department’s catalogues
OFSTI Wiki
The Interoperability and Technologies Area at the TIC Salut Social Foundation provides and updates the contents of this wiki to provide knowledge about interoperability, standards, and catalogues in the health sector.
Projects
The OFSTI participates in a cross-cutting way in various projects in the Catalan Health System and the TIC Salut Social Foundation’s own projects. The work includes leading interoperability tasks, developing HL7 FHIR messages and SNOMED CT and LOINC coding, developing the pilot version of the Social Terminology Server, and handling certifications for HL7 FHIR testbenches for diabetes mellitus monitoring devices.
A selection of these are described below.
WiFIS (Work Flow for Health Institutions) is an interoperability framework that enables centres in Catalonia’s comprehensive health system for public use (SISCAT) to exchange information in a standard format. This standardises processes and communications between primary care, specialised care and mental health centres’ systems.
Implementation Guidelines have been produced to standardise processes and communications. These define the rules, information exchange models, messaging and terminologies to carry out this standardisation. All centres that follow the implementation guidelines can connect to the interoperability platform defined in the iS3 project to exchange information with other centres that use the same protocol.
The main standards WiFIS is based on are HL7 V2.5 messaging (with adoptions from version 2.7 and later) and SNOMED CT terminology to represent the content.
A certification process for blood glucose meters was conducted in 2017 and 2018.
The goal is to promote a common data exchange format so the information generated by blood glucose meters is interoperable.
The process involves verifying that the device follows PCHAlliance’s Continua guidelines. More specifically, the ISO/IEEE 11073-10417: Device specialisation — Glucose meter standard.
OFSTI has participated in the European ICTUSnet project, led jointly by the Master Plan for Cerebral Vascular Diseases of Catalonia and AQuAS.
The tasks performed by the TIC Salut Social Foundation were aimed at defining the interoperability framework.
Within the framework of the SIMDCAT project, the OFSTI has produced an evaluation report on DICOM Supplement 145 to standardise the representation, sending and treatment of digital pathology.
The foundation has participated in the InterSocial project by developing the Social Terminology Server.
See all the information:
The OFSTI supports the TIC Salut Social Foundation’s projects and its work areas, such as mHealth, in matters including the certification of mobile apps, the mobile app development guide, and the mobile app development decision-making support tool.
It has participated and participates in projects such as:
04. Members and collaborators
The TIC Salut Social Foundation collaborates with and is a member of the following leading international standardisation and interoperability organisations:
SNOMED International, NRC (SNOMED CT National Reference CENTER)
SNOMED International is a non-profit organisation that holds the rights to and owns the SNOMED CT clinical terminology (Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms) and is responsible for updating and distributing it internationally.
SNOMED Spanish Edition is the international version of the standard translated into Latin American Spanish.
Some countries, as members of this organisation, maintain and distribute a national edition of SNOMED CT for use within their territory. The Spanish Extension is the national edition for Spain maintained by the SNOMED CT National Reference Centre for Spain at the Ministry of Health, Consumption and Social Welfare
HL7 International – HL7 Spain
HL7 Spain is the official body of HL7 International that works on the development of global data interoperability standards in the field of health and promotes the use of HL7 standards in Spain by participating in events around the country, courses, training and publication of guides and manuals on the use and implementation of the standards.
It is the only accredited organisation in Spain for training and certifying health professionals in HL7 standards.
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)
This is a non-profit standards development organisation for the field of health founded in 1987. It works internationally and is currently one of the most important for messaging standards in medical IT.
IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address clinical needs. Its mission is to provide a complete framework of standards related to the exchange, integration and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and management to enable interoperable digital workflows.
LOINC International
LOINC International is a non-profit medical research organisation associated with Indiana University. This organisation promotes the LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes) international standard, which SISCAT uses to represent laboratory tests.
