Health interoperability glossary
The terms, standards and frameworks behind health interoperability, clearly explained and backed by official sources.
Legal
Laws and frameworks that enable or limit exchange
- Consent for processing health data
Expression of will by which a person authorizes the use of their health data for specified purposes.
- Cures Act
2016 US federal law whose Title IV is the legal basis for information blocking rules and TEFCA.
- EHDS
EU regulation on people's access to their electronic health data, its exchange and its reuse.
- Electronic signature and digital signature
An e-signature expresses the intent to sign; a digital one, using certificates, verifies signer and integrity.
- GDPR
EU regulation on the processing of personal data, which treats health data as a special category.
- Health data protection
Rules and measures that define who may collect, use and share health data, on what legal basis and with what safeguards.
- Health data residency and sovereignty
Where health data are stored (residency) and which laws and authorities can decide over them (sovereignty).
- HIPAA
US federal law whose rules protect health information handled by providers, health plans and their business associates.
- Information blocking
In the US, a practice likely to interfere with access, exchange or use of electronic health information.
- LGPD
Brazil's personal data protection law, which treats health data as sensitive data.
- PIPEDA
Canada's federal private-sector privacy law, which also covers health information.
Organizational
Governance, agreements and processes between organizations
- Consent management
Practice of recording a person's decisions about the use of their health information and enforcing them.
- DPI-H
Approach that proposes investing in shared digital health services instead of isolated systems for each programme.
- EIF
European Commission framework with layers, principles and recommendations for public service interoperability.
- Health data governance
Rules, accountable bodies and procedures that decide who may use which health data, for what purposes and how.
- Health interoperability
Ability of systems and organizations to exchange clinical information and use it, with both ends understanding the same.
- HIE
Process and infrastructure through which professionals, facilities and patients share clinical information.
- IHE
International initiative that turns standards such as HL7 and DICOM into integration profiles and tests them.
- MPI / EMPI
Service that recognizes that records in different systems belong to the same person and gives them a common identity.
- OpenHIE
Open community that maintains a reference architecture for national health information exchange.
- TEFCA
US national framework for health information networks to connect with each other under common rules.
Semantic
Terminologies and the shared meaning of data
- ICD-10
Tenth revision of WHO's classification of diseases, with codes for diseases, health problems and causes of death.
- ICD-11
Eleventh revision of WHO's International Classification of Diseases, free to use and available through an API.
- IPS
Minimal clinical summary, in a standard format, so that a clinician who does not know the patient can treat them safely.
- LOINC
International catalogue of codes for laboratory tests, clinical measurements, questionnaires and documents.
- openEHR
Open standard for storing and sharing health data that separates the technical structure from clinical content.
- SNOMED CT
International catalogue of clinical concepts with codes and defined meaning, such as diagnoses and procedures.
- UCUM
Code for writing units of measure so that a computer interprets them without ambiguity.
- Value set
List of codes allowed for a specific data element, drawn from one or more terminologies.
Syntactic
Format and structure of messages, documents and resources
- CDA
HL7 standard for clinical documents in XML that people can read and systems can process.
- DICOM
International standard that defines how medical images and related information are stored, queried and sent.
- FHIR
HL7 International standard that organises health data into reusable resources and exchanges them through web APIs.
- HL7 v2
HL7 messaging standard that hospital systems use to notify each other of admissions, orders and results.
Technical
Protocols, profiles, security and exchange infrastructure
- IHE ATNA
IHE profile that defines authentication between systems, encrypted communication and the audit log.
- IHE MHD
IHE profile that offers a FHIR-based API to publish, find and retrieve clinical documents.
- IHE XDS.b
IHE profile for sharing clinical documents between institutions without centralizing them, with a common registry.
- OAuth 2.0
Internet standard for authorizing an application to access data in another service without handing over a password.
- OpenID Connect
Standard that lets an application know who the user is by relying on a trusted identity provider.
- SMART App Launch
HL7 guide that defines how an application gets permission to access data in a system with a FHIR API.
- Terminology server
System that holds clinical code catalogues and tells whether a code is valid, what it means and how it maps to another.