Interoperability and standards are a key element in Ireland’s new digital health strategy, which features a strong focus on ensuring data from across the health service is captured in a structured form using agreed national definitions and health information standards.

The Digital Health Framework for Ireland (2024-2030), released this week, emphasises that standards must be uniformly adopted across the health and social care service and used consistently to ensure the data can be safely shared, analysed, and used without change in meaning.

The strategy says a review of appropriate standards is required to build a standards framework consisting of a unified set of internationally approved interoperability standards, such as HL7, FHIR and openEHR.

The strategy says this will accelerate the adoption and endorse the use of more modern standards, including HL7 FHIR for data exchange across systems, apps, and platforms.

It also commits to endorsing SNOMED CT as the principal standard for clinical terminologies, alongside the ICD classification systems for disease coding.

“We will continue to adhere to best practice design principles for developing Health Information Standards including the adoption and adaption of International and European standards where relevant,” it says.

As part of these foundational elements, the HSE is already rolling out a “robust” digital identity program in place to ensure all staff have their own unique digital identity and allow for audit logs when accessing digital health records.

Healthcare professionals and registered users across health and social care services will have single sign-on and secure access to applications through the HSE’s Healthcare Worker Identity & Access Management initiative.

Patients will be able to identify themselves using their personal public service number (PPSN), while the Individual Health Identifier (IHI) will continue to be used for identifying digital health records and associated data.

eHealth Ireland has been spearheading work on the IHI, which almost six million people have had recorded on either their GP or hospital records or both.

The Healthcare Identifier Service has also been mapping IHIs to Ireland’s hospital patient administration system, Dedalus’ IPMS, and the IHI is now live in all GP practice management systems, where it has been matched with over 90 per cent of GP patient records.

eHealth Ireland is also building an HSE Data Dictionary to standardise all data elements throughout the organisation.