Use-Case Driven Approach for a Pragmatic Implementation of Interoperability in eHealth

Innovation in IT solutions introduces new usages in ehealth that allows the patient to be more active in his (her) health care and well-being. Strong expectations on electronic exchanges or shared medical documents from healthcare professionals and patients are pushing decision makers and stakeholders to develop quickly efficient and structured data enabled health IT infrastructures. One of the challenges of this paradigm shift is to provide at the point of care interoperable solutions in full compliance with regulations, ethics, organizational and technical states of the art. This paper describes this approach developed as a four steps process and defines the basic concepts for designing an interoperability infrastructure. For each of the steps, examples will be provided and discussed accordingly with the different interoperability layers (legal, policy, process, information and technical) developed in the Refined eHealth European Interoperability Framework (ReEIF) (eHealth Network, 2015).