Using CEF Digital Service Infrastructures in the Smart4Health Project for the Exchange of Electronic Health Records
This addresses the challenge of integrating standardized digital infrastructures for health data exchange in the EU, but it is incremental as it focuses on evaluating existing frameworks rather than proposing new solutions.
The report assesses the applicability of CEF Digital Service Infrastructures for the Smart4Health project to enable EU citizens to manage and exchange electronic health records, finding that most CEF building blocks are not ready for immediate use without further implementation efforts and that specific use cases need clarification.
The Smart4Health (S4H) software application will empower EU citizens to manage, analyze, and exchange their aggregated electronic health data. In order to provide such a service, basic features are needed to ensure usability, reliability, and trust. The CEF building blocks implement such functionalities while complying with EU regulations. This report examines the current status and applicability of the CEF building blocks for the envisioned S4H software application. The major findings of the report are that (1) most CEF building blocks are currently not ready to be applied without further implementation efforts and (2) the S4H-specific use cases and user needs, to which the single CEF building blocks correspond, must be clarified. Open questions raised in this report need to be answered before a clear analysis can be made. Moreover, the functionalities of CEF building blocks aim at the matured product, while for the first version of the S4H software application basic implementations suffice. Still, concepts need to be elaborated of how the sample implementation of CEF building blocks or suitable alternative applications can be included into the system at a later point.