UN Sets New Standards To Improve E-Health Interoperability

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency focusing on the information and communication technologies, has offered its first stage approval to an important standard enabling an exchange of multimedia health data between health provider, a controlling function and patient.

The new standard will enable different e-health systems to smoothly exchange patient health data in both low- and high-resource settings, making it ideal for applications in both developed and developing countries.

According to e-Health experts in ITU, a combination of a common data definition with connectivity across different systems – ranging from the personal health and point-of-care devices described in Recommendation ITU-T H.810 to a range of health management back-ends – will provide simple, secure and scalable interoperability.

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun I. Touré noted, “In addition to technical issues, 

discussions on e-health encompass legal, ethical, cultural, economic and regional aspects. We have seen increased impetus by the e-health community to engage with ITU in order to facilitate a rapid rollout of these technologies that have such a valuable role to play in bolstering global health initiatives.”

The development of Recommendation ITU-T H.860, Multimedia e-health data exchange services: Architecture, services and data dictionary was led by ITU Member Platform Health, a non-profit organisation, based on successful reference implementations in a range of countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

The common health schema of Recommendation ITU-T H.860 is applicable to a wide spectrum of diseases (non-communicable, communicable, maternal/child, trauma, etc.), interventions (preventive, curative, palliative), and health IT systems (from simple standalone, to integrated care, web services and mobile applications).

Source: Agencies