International Patient Summary Implementation Guide
2.0.0 - STU 2 International flag

International Patient Summary Implementation Guide, published by HL7 International / Patient Care. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 2.0.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/HL7/fhir-ips/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

Known Issues and Future Development

Page standards status: Informative

Known Issues

  1. Lack in representation of the summarization activities, including who did it, what was done (medication reconciliation, allergy reconciliation, medication allergy reconciliation, immunization/vaccination reconciliation, problem list/diagnosis reconciliation), what was the result, when and where was it done. This covers also the "Nature of the IPS" element included in ISO 27269.
  2. Profile specificity to be improved. Not all the expected rules can be automatically validated, due to a lack of representation in the specified profiles.
  3. All of the slicing rules defined for the section entries have been specified in this version as open. This choice has been made to give more flexibility to the IPS, at the expense of the capability of fully and automatically validating the instances. In this sense the profile may technically allow the inclusion of inappropriate resources. Specifiers are encouraged to add further constraints or additional slices to mitigate this risk. Future versions may reconsider the current choice.
  4. More constrained vocabularies. The choices made in this version reflect the need of balancing the expectations of reducing optionality, to improve interoperability; and of avoiding over-constraints, to facilitate the local adoption. Moreover, it has been recognized the current lack, in some cases, of globally recognized and freely usable vocabularies (e.g. for the identification of medications); and the need, for specific concept domains, to extend the value sets based on new SNOMED CT and SNOMED IPS Terminology content. For these reasons, the binding is required only in a few cases; preferred or extensible bindings have been used instead.

Future Development

  1. Investigate the relationships and the possible synergies with the proposed International Patient Access Implementation Guide; exploring and better clarifying the role of the IPS document and of its reusable components (IPS profiles library).
  2. Explore the adoption of the Provenance resource with the IPS (bundle level, composition level or entry level) to document the IPS curation (see Known Issue ###1 above) (see also the "International Patient Summary: Use Cases" confluence page)
  3. Include additional guidance or references on approaches for selecting appropriate summary content and genearating narrative representations
  4. Gather feedback on the IPS $summary operation introduced in STU1.1 of the this guide.