Description
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The standardization efforts enabled by ICTs applied to health care has a very long story and HL7 organization has played a major role until. Until a few years ago, the attention was focused on health messages standardization, later on, the emphasis was placed on the structure and format of health records. A significant result of this action is the approved standard HL7 CDA (Clinical Document Architecture), now universally accepted.
Since 2000, awareness of the need for a real leap forward in health information technology architecture raised, in particular attention was given on two main critical issues:
(i) not only data structures and documents standardisation but also protocols became an essential element to ensure that the nodes of a massively distributed health system can really cooperate,
(ii) the automation of a significant amount of manual and repetitive work about value-added activities performed by doctors, laboratories, hospitals, etc. which penalize the effectiveness and efficiency of the system, meaning the capability of providing the patient the best service at minimum cost.
ICT can substantially contribute to a sustainable solution of the two problems raised by the deployment of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for health, which is a standard and at global level. Adopting a SOA approach ensures the cooperation of a large number of complex and heterogeneous entities (organizations, applications, users), of the health doamin, producing a standardization and interoperability of the application services.
In 2005, HL7 and the Object Management Group (OMG) launched the HSSP project (Healthcare Services Specification Project), having as objectives:
(a) the definition of a shared and global services architecture for health and (b) the definition of a suite of "generic" application services as a standard. Specifically, the HSSP project activities result in: (1) identification of candidate services for standardization, (2) the choice of priorities among the identified services and (3) the specification of functional requirements and criteria compliance for these services - Service Functional Model (SFM). The adoption of HSSP standards by the health actors allows to foresee the possibility of a global ecosystem able to delivery medical diagnosis and treatment in a relevant, effective, efficient and sustainable way.
The HealthSOAF project aims to develop a plug-and-play service architecture framework of SOA services for the second generation of e-health, based on HSSP international standards. The HealthSOAF framework will allow integration of distributed back-end medical functions and front-end advanced interaction (Web 2.0) in with and between users - patients, clinicians, advanced operators, and citizens.
Finally, the project activities also allow companies and proposing research organizations to pursue the following objectives: (i) participate as players in the HSSP project, (ii) produce, through research and experimentation, innovative implementations of plug-and-play, standard, generic, resilient, knowledgeable services, and (iii) produce these services not only for the ICT Italian health market, but for the health world market.
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Distribution
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Advancement of distribution in %
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Total amount distributed
2,235,501.72 euro
NOP R&C distributed amount
1,990,172.04 euro
PAC distributed amount
0.00 euro
Amount distributed with other funds 245,329.68 euro
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