IHE/HL7 Implementation Guide for eSupply

Abstract

The use of eCommerce solutions in the German health care market is hindered by fragmented solutions and lack of guidance to the use of standards. Especially the area of procurement is mainly dominated by proprietary solutions. Also, the splits in the area of information transfer - which are attributable to the non-coverage usage of standards – result in delays, transcription errors, wrong orders and patient confusion. The project ”Standards zur Unterstutzung von eCommerce im Gesundheitswesen” (eCG) w a s launched in August 2012 and i s funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy – ”Bundesministerium fur Wirtschaft und Energie” (BMWi) – within the programme ”Mittelstand Digital”. The eCG project consortium consists of ”Hochschule Niederrhein” (HSNR), ”Zentrum fur Informations- und Medizintechnik der Universitatsklinik Heidelberg” (ZIM), The German Medical Technology Association ”Bundesverband der Medizintechnologie” (BVMed e.V.) and ”Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise” in Germany (IHE Deutschland e.V.). One of the main goals of this project is to design a sustainable supply system for healthcare and subsequently produce a significant increase of potentials for efficiency within the health sector by developing interoperability between different, already used standards in the healthcare and the logistics domain. After a literature research and analyses of business processes in hospital new IHE Integration Profiles were modeled in order to describe the interaction between different (software) actors in a hospital starting with ordering products in a point of care until buying it by an external vendor. These profiles are described in an implementation guide ”eSupply in Healthcare”. For transactions between the actors HL7 v2 messages and GS1 standard were used.