BS EN 13606-1 is a European standard that aims to define a rigorous and stable information architecture for communicating part or all of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) of a single subject of care (patient). This is to support the interoperability of systems and components that need to communicate (access, transfer, add or modify) EHR data via electronic messages or as distributed objects:
- Preserving the original clinical meaning intended by the author
- Reflecting the confidentiality of that data as intended by the author and patient.
It may also be used for EHR communication between an EHR system or repository and clinical applications or middleware components (such as decision support components) that need to access or provide EHR data.
BS EN 13606-1 considers the EHR to be the persistent longitudinal and potentially multi-enterprise or multi-national record of health and care provision relating to a single subject of care (the patient), created and stored in one or more physical systems in order to inform the subject’s future health care and to provide a medico-legal record of care that has been provided. Whilst an EHR service or system will need to interact with many other services or systems providing terminology, medical knowledge, guidelines, workflow, security, persons registries, billing etc. this European Standard has only touched on those areas if some persistent trace of such interactions is required in the EHR itself, and requires specific features in the reference model to allow their communication.
BS EN 13606-1 will predominantly be used to support the direct care given to identifiable individuals, or to support population monitoring systems such as disease registries and public health surveillance. Uses of health records for other purposes such as teaching, clinical audit, administration and reporting, service management, research and epidemiology, which often require anonymisation or aggregation of individual records, are not the focus of this European Standard but such secondary uses might also find the standard useful.