The European Commission's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) and the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) are pleased to announce the launch of a new Initiative - the EU-US MoU and Roadmap eHealth Cooperation.
This initiative will address the need for international interoperability of health records and the need to improve the ehealth skills of the current workforce. On behalf of the European Commission's DG CONNECT and ONC, we are pleased to invite your valued participation in the kick-off of the eHealth Cooperation Initiative. This initiative takes place under the auspices of the ONC Standards & Interoperability Framework in conjunction with the European Commission's DG CONNECT.
There is an ever-growing demand and need for patients to access their own health data through mobile devices and personal computers. This access will allow the patient to be knowledgeable about their own conditions and track their medical histories throughout their lives as they move around countries or around the world. Physicians also need access to patient information for the purpose of remote consultation or patient care outside a patient’s home country or state.
Global progress is being made in defining standards for semantic interoperability, syntactic interoperability and patient mediated exchange that will eventually allow for the easy sharing of data between countries. However, many different coding, classification and messaging standards are currently in use, hindering the ability of separate countries to exchange data. It is the intent of this new effort to obtain and aggregate input from stakeholders around the world toward the establishment of agreed upon methods and standards for international interoperability of health records.
The demand for ehealth expertise in the workplace is growing every day. Many ehealth jobs are going unfilled due to lack of training, expertise and accreditation. Standards and methods need to be agreed upon to define what skills, expertise and credentials make up a health informatics professional. It is the intent of this new effort to seek input from academicians, industry, professional societies and other stakeholders to define and establish these standards and methods.
The official launch of the eHealth Cooperation Initiative will be held as a web meeting and teleconference on June 20th 2013, from 9:00 - 10:00am EDT (USA and Canada) or 3:00 - 4:00pm CEST (Mainland Europe).
Details on the eHealth Cooperation launch including web meeting access, call in information, reference materials and the Project Charter are posted on the eHealth Cooperation wiki page. If you would like to volunteer to participate in the eHealth Cooperation Initiative, please review the documentation on this page. Once you have read through the material regarding participation, levels of commitment, guidelines for participation and voting rights, please sign up to participate in the eHealth Cooperation Initiative by completing the registration form on the eHealth Cooperation Sign Up Wiki Page.
Your perspectives, expertise and experiences are critical to the success of this initiative and we look forward to your participation in the eHealth Cooperation Initiative.