HL7 Europe Common Cancer Model, published by HL7 Europe. This guide is not an authorized publication; it is the continuous build for version 0.1.0 built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) CI Build. This version is based on the current content of https://github.com/hl7-eu/cancer-common/ and changes regularly. See the Directory of published versions

Background

The background

copy of the confluence page - to be rewrite

This Working Group (WG) was created during the HL7 Europe WGM 2025 that was hosted in Lisbon in February 2025. It was based on the results obtained basing from a survey activity performed after the “European Cancer Mission” track during the HL7 FHIR Connectathon and HL7 Europe WGM 2024 on the data model adopted by different European and national projects on cancer topic.The results of this survey will be summarized in a paper that we are writing and which we will publish on an international journey.

The survey highlighted that:

Each project support different needs and use cases, so the data models are heterogeneous Data availability in involved care facilities EHR is difficult to know All projects are based on secondary data use Some concepts are adopted by all projects Some standard vocabularies are adopted by different projects Redundancy in data model can facilitate the queries for the clinicians It is fundamental to reconstruct the patient’s journey and disease history (patients are not always treated in single hospitals) It is difficult to map data from one standard to another (e.g. from OMOP to FHIR). Taking into account these considerations, the intent was to create the European Cancer Common Data Model that, as will be described, could be adopted by different SDOs (Standard Development Organizations) to implement standard specifications that share the same data model allowing to support the map between the different standards.

The WG intends to collaborate with mCODE (minimal Common Oncology Data Elements) initiative to evaluate the possible collaboration to create an International Cancer Common Data Model and, then, an HL7 International FHIR Implementation Guide.