Region Östergötland is making a Request For Information on openEHR platforms and tools. We are really happy to tell that it is done in collaboration with six (6) other county councils:
Region Stockholm
Region Uppsala
Västra Götalandsregionen
Region Skåne
Region Kalmar län
Region Jönköpings län
Together these county councils represent 2/3 of Sweden’s population!
The RFI was published on April 14th, and was publicly available through TED (ted.europa.eu) on April 17th. A PDF version of the RFI document (and an Appendix) is attached to this post. Direct link to the RFI at TED: 2023/S 077-231835 Deadline for answering was May 10th.
The RFI also included an invitation to digital contractor demo sessions on May 31st , June 1st and June 2nd (with a back-up demo day June 5th). Details on the demo sessions are included in the RFI announcement.
For questions regarding thr RFI, use the procurement system where the RFI is published. Answers will be publicly available.
Åsa Skagerhult , on behalf of Region Östergötland & collaborators
Appendix to the invitation: Appendix A OpenEHR – an Implementors Guideline related to Swedish laws and regulations in healthcare.pdf (481.1 KB) Please note that the attempt to compare some of the care unit separation requirements to a “multitenancy” concept in Appendix A was easy to misinterpret by suppliers in the RFI and will likely be reformulated in later procurements. What we were looking for was not a total logical separation (the normal meaning of multitenancy), but rather a conditional separation that can vary based on active choice/overrides and patient consent. We realized that for example configurable ABAC approaches might often be more suitable then “real” multitenancy for this. (Multitenancy can also be interesting for some customers, but for other reasons.)
RFI Results
All documents related to the RFI are (or will soon be) available for download below.
There might be even be more Swedish regions and organisations joining. The initial work was a bit of an extra rush because at least one of the regions had to get results very soon. So there has not been time to invite everyone and anchor things everywhere in the country yet.
Are you aware of any interest shown by Region Västerbotten when it comes to this solution? Furthermore, will there be a demonstration showcasing the functionality of this solution, particularly in terms of exchanging data for primary and/or secondary purposes within the European Health Data Space?
One of the real bonuses of an openEHR-based approach is that all of the data (governance willing) is immediately available to the health care provider via the openEHR API, and in particular, the archetype query language. This has been used in very many contexts to provide data for both primary and secondary data exchange purposes
There is a an ad-hoc group looking at how we can fit in to the European Health Data space efforts.
Hi Nicklas, I’ve been in contact with Region Västerbotten regarding openEHR, but not recently. If they are interested they are welcome to get in contact. The planned demo sessions will be open for others to attend.
@nijo it would be great if Region Västerbotten could join, especially since you have the University Hospital of Umeå that shares many of the complex needs that an openEHR platform is very suitable for. We could then share solutions based on the platform.
If we could also get Region Örebro län (that includes Örebro University hospital) to join I believe we would cover all Swedish university hospitals and all national GMCs. That would be very valuable.
P.S. The regions starting the RFI had no intent of being excluding towards other regions, just a ridiculously tight time schedule to get a RFI result befor the summer, so other regions are very welcome to join.
Hi, yes they are held virtually May 31th, June 1st and June 2nd. The plans for the demo sessions are described in the RFI document that is attached to this post.
Hi, thanks for getting back to me. Lately, I’ve been focusing more and more on health data at Umeå University Hospital and started to join an internal and external network of people with the goals to add more datasets to the European Health Data Space. There is of course a realization that a lot of the work requires specific domain and use-case expertise to decide which Information Models should be selected. I’m wondering if similar discussions are going on in other hospitals (Regioner) and/or Universities in Sweden? Since this has to be coordinated for our infrastructure to be interoperable.
I see a lot of projects out there that are about this matter, so the health domains should start coordinating around common information models.
Here is an interesting report from TEHDAS titled: “Recommendations to enhance
interoperability within HealthData@EU”, where OpenEHR is being considered as a complement to other standards. Link: TEHDAS assesses data interoperability standards - Tehdas
Amazing, what an interest! We got 13 answers to our RFI. We are going through them right now and will as soon as possible send out invites to the demo sessions.
A slightly updated version of the RFI report is now uploaded (version 2.0). Information about Cambio that was confidential in the previous version is now included.
I also added a link to the wiki page where full RFI answers are uploaded (the ones that are not confidential).