Pre-commercial procurement of personal health services: Interoperability considerations

Public healthcare providers are increasingly guiding their patients to using personal health services to support self-care. The provider is typically in the role of specifying the required functionalities and purchasing the technologies to be used by the patient. A new pre-commercial procurement (PCP) model has been introduced by the European Union with the objective of increasing use of new innovative technologies and interaction between the procurers and technology suppliers. The model is well fitted for personal health services where there is a high potential for exploiting advanced information and communication technologies (ICT). When applying the PCP model it is important to ensure that the developed prototypes can be integrated to the existing health IT infrastructure. This is particularly important when the developed service needs to exchange information with Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Personal Health Record (PHR) systems. Since the relevant interfaces are still largely missing from existing EHRs and PHRs it is important to provide test interfaces, which enable the developed services to be tested for interoperability during the PCP process. This paper provides background for the interoperability needs of personal health services and describes the test server solution developed in the context of the DECIPHER PCP project. Based on feedback from the supplier companies the test server was an acceptable and useful solution for the development phase as actual PHR interfaces have not yet been implemented by the procurers.