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Section 1c: FHIR®
Section 3: Implementation Guides

HL7 FHIR® Implementation Guide: International Patient Summary, Edition 2

DESCRIPTION

An International Patient Summary (IPS) document is an electronic health record extract containing essential healthcare information about a subject of care. The IPS dataset is minimal and non-exhaustive; specialty-agnostic and condition-independent; but still clinically relevant. As specified in EN 17269 and ISO/DIS 27269, it is designed for supporting the use case scenario for ‘unplanned, cross border care’, but it is not limited to it. It is intended to be international, i.e., to provide generic solutions for global application beyond a particular region or country.

The 2.0.0 edition of IPS FHIR Implementation Guide incorporates substantial feedback from implementers and contains breaking changes since the 1.1.0 edition. For a complete description of changes, refer to https://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/changes.html

Standard available at http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/STU2. 

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

HL7 FHIR® Implementation Guide: International Patient Summary, Edition 2 may also go by the following names or acronyms:

"HL7 FHIR® IG: International Patient Summary, R1",IPS

BENEFITS

  • Increases patient empowerment and the promotion of individual and community health in a global environment
  • Enables innovative ecosystem of eHealth/Health IT that supports the electronic exchange of human- and machine-readable health, clinical, medical and management information to advance the health of individuals and communities

IMPLEMENTATIONS/CASE STUDIES

Sponsor Agencies 

  • ONC
  • European Commission

See https://international-patient-summary.net/ips-vendor-support/

DEVELOPMENT BACKGROUND

The idea of the International Patient Summary has been one of the main results of the 2010 EU/US Memorandum of Understanding through its two operational arms: the European project Trillium Bridge and the Interoperability of EHR work group formed under the ONC Standards and Interoperability Framework (ONC S&I) EU/US eHealth Cooperation Initiative. These initiatives identified the need for common templates and vocabularies for the patient summary.
The Joint Initiative Council (JIC) on SDO Global Health Informatics Standardization has initiated the standard sets project with patient summary as its pilot; and the IPS became one of the main subjects of the new EU / US roadmap , having as a declared goal “to enable a standardized international patient summary (IPS) to be in use by 2020.”
The first standardization activity concerning the IPS was initially promoted in April 2014 by ONC within HL7 International. The project was called “INTERnational PAtient Summary (INTERPAS)”. In May 2016, the European Commission granted an Agreement with CEN/ TC 251, recognizing the need to effectively support the leadership and active participation in IPS standardization activities. A formal agreement between HL7 International and CEN/TC 251 was signed in April 2017 in which these organizations established “in order to further the care for citizens across the globe […] to collaborate on a single, common International Patient Summary (IPS) specification”; and that “the IPS specification shall focus on a minimal and non-exhaustive Patient Summary dataset, which is specialty-agnostic and condition-independent, but still clinically relevant.”
This successful cross SDOs collaboration effort lead to the development of several products: CEN/TC 251 focused on the IPS dataset, formalized by the CEN/TC 251 European standard (EN) 17269:2019 "Health informatics - The International Patient Summary"; now moved in ISO as ISO/DIS 27269. HL7 has worked on the HL7 CDA Implementation Guide, published as STU in October 2018; and on the HL7 FHIR IG (this publication). SNOMED CT has published a subset of freely usable SNOMED CT concepts (Global Patient Set); IHE has recently started to work on a new IHE IPS profile.

RELATED DOCUMENTS

HL7 FHIR® Implementation Guide: International Patient Summary, Edition 2

STU DOCUMENTS

HL7 FHIR® Implementation Guide: International Patient Summary, Edition 2 See the standard at http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/STU2. (Submit Feedback on STU)
HL7 FHIR® Implementation Guide: International Patient Summary, Release 1 STU 1.1 See the standard at http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/STU1.1/. Expiration Nov 2024
HL7 FHIR® Implementation Guide: International Patient Summary, Release 1 Please see the resource detail for link and download instructions. Expiration May 2022

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

See the errata letter for 2.0.1.

TOPICS

  • Care Provision
  • Clinical Statement
  • Laboratory
  • Medical Records
  • Patient Care
  • Pharmacy

BALLOT TYPE

  • STU

STATUS DATE

2025-10-03

RESPONSIBLE WORK GROUP

Patient Care

PRODUCT TYPE

  • Implementation Guide

STAKEHOLDERS

  • Clinical Decision Support Systems Vendors
  • EHR, PHR Vendors
  • Emergency Services Providers
  • Health Care IT Vendors
  • Healthcare Institutions
  • HIS Vendors
  • Local and State Departments of Health
  • Regulatory Agency
  • Standards Development Organizations (SDOs)

FAMILY

  • FHIR

CURRENT STATE

  • Active

REALM

  • Universal